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2D^e Kiijergiae literature ^ertefi 



JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH 

ESSAYS BY 
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

EDITED BY 

WILLIAM P. TRENT 
With Additional Material for Study 




^eJ^ibergiOePFeg 



HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fiftb Avenue 
Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 



L!3RARY«fC0NaRES3 

Two ConiRs Received 
J\N 2t I90f 
CooyrleM Entre, i 

01 ASS ^ XXc„Ne. 



CONTENTS 






PAGB 

Biographical Sketch of Macaulay . . . . . iii 

MACAuiiAY's Style xi 

The Structure and Form of the Essay on Johnson . xvi 
Bibliographies : Macaulay and Johnson . . . xriii 

Prefatory Note 1 

SAMUEL JOHNSON 3 

OLIVER GOLDSMITH . , 67 

Extracts from Johnson's Works, Bos well's Johnson, 

AND Piozzi's Anecdotes 93 

Suggestions for Further Study 109 



COPYRIGHT 1906 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF MACAULAT. 

There can be little doubt that Lord Macaulay is the 
most popular writer of English prose that this century has 
produced. Thousands of copies of his History of England 
are still sold every year, and travellers tell us that if an 
Australian settler possesses three books only, the first two 
will be the Bible and Shakespeare, and the third, Macau- 
lay's Essays, And yet his authority as a critic and histo- 
rian has been shaken, and his capacity as a poet — for his 
Lays of Ancient Rome is a very popular book — seriously 
questioned. Nor is his popularity confined to any one circle 
of readers. Cultivated men and women in their conversa- 
tion and writings assume a knowledge of his works as a 
matter of course, but the intelligent laboring man, who is 
striving for an education, is equally, perhaps more, familiar 
with them. It is plain that a writer who makes such a 
wide and lasting appeal deserves careful study, and that 
a brief survey of his life cannot be without interest. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, 
at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire. His father Zachary 
was a Scotchman of probity and talents, who was a dis- 
tinguished promoter of abolition. Macaulay, therefore, 
came honestly by the middle-class virtues and defects that 
are so salient in his character. He was a precocious, nay 
rather a wonderful child, but does not appear to have been 
spoiled. His memory was prodigious and his reading enor- 
mous, while his faculty for turning out hundreds of re- 
spectable verses was simply phenomenal. After a happy 
period of schooling he entered Cambridge, where he won 
prizes for verse, and made a reputation for himself as a 
scholar and speaker, but failed of the highest honors on 



iv MA CAUL AY, 

account of his inaptitude for mathematics. He graduated 
at twenty-two, was elected a Fellow of Trinity two years 
later, and the next year startled the world by his brilliant 
essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. From this time 
his career was one of almost unbroken success. He was 
called to the bar in 1826, but gave more time to his writing 
and to his political aspirations than to his profession. In 
1830 he was elected to the House of Commons through the 
patronage of Lord Lansdowne, and began his career as a 
staunch Whig at one of the most important crises in Eng- 
lish history, — that of the first Reform Bill. 

It is quite plain that if Macaulay had taken seriously to 
politics at this juncture he would have made a name for 
himself among English statesmen, or at least among Eng- 
lish orators. The speeches he delivered were enthusias- 
tically received, he stood high with the ministers of a party 
just coming into power, he had the courage of his convic- 
tions, he had the wide erudition that has been a tradition 
with English statesmen, and he had the practical ability to 
conduct a political canvass (for the new borough of Leeds) ; 
but he liked the adulation of society a little too well, and his 
income was not sufficient to let him bide his time. Dinners 
at Holland House and breakfasts with Rogers were delight- 
ful, no doubt, as delightful as the letters in which he de- 
scribed them to his favorite sister Hannah ; and so too was 
the praise he got for his articles in the Edinburgh ; but this 
devotion to society and literature could hardly have been 
kept up along with an entirely serious and absorbing pur- 
suit of political honors. He was probably well advised, 
therefore, when in 1834 he accepted the presidency of a new 
law commission for India and a membership of the Supreme 
Council of Calcutta. It meant banishment, but it meant 
also a princely income of which half could be saved. So 
he set out, taking his sister Hannah with him, for he was a 
bachelor, discharged his duties admirably, and returned to 
England in 1838. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.] v 

On his return he reentered Parliamvent and served with 
distinction but not with conspicuous success. His genius 
had been diverted and his desires were more than ever 
divided. He obtained a seat in Lord John Russell's cabinet 
and supported the Whigs on all great questions, but he was 
better known as the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome 
(1842) and the Essays, He lost his seat for Edinburgh in 
1847, having been too outspoken and liberal in his views, 
yet this meant little to one who was a student by nature 
and who was about to bring out the first two volumes of the 
most popular history ever written (1849). The remaining 
decade of his life was practically the only period in which his 
energies were undivided. He was indeed reelected to Par- 
liament from Edinburgh without his solicitation, and he was 
raised to the peerage in 1857, being the first man to receive 
such an honor mainly for literary work ; but he did little be- 
sides labor on his History and make notable contributions 
to the Encyclopcedia Britannica, Other honors of various 
sorts were showered on him and his fame reached the pro- 
portions of Byron's, but his health began to fail and he did 
not live long enough to experience any reaction. He died of 
heart trouble on December 28, 1859, in the fulness of his 
intellectual powers, and leaving his great history incomplete. 

The chief reasons for Macaulay's tremendous popularity 
are not far to seek. He possessed a style which whether 
metalhc, as has been claimed, or not, is at all times clear 
and strenuous. He simply commanded attention by his 
positive assurance of statement, and, when once he had ob- 
tained it, took care not to lose it through any obscurity. 
Rather than indulge in qualifications that might embarrass 
the reader, he chose, it may be unconsciously, to state half 
truths as whole truths, and to play the advocate while posing 
as the critic. The world has always loved the man who 
knows his own mind, and Macaulay knew his and pro- 
claimed the fact loudly. Then again the world has always 
lored the strong man who is not too far aloof from it to 



VI 3IACAULAY. 

hold many of its prejudices and opinions. This was just 
the case with Macaulay, who was little more than a middle- 
class Englishman with vastly magnified powers. Subtlety 
of intellect and delicacy of taste were as far from him as 
they have always been from a majority of his countrymen, 
but dogmatic assurance and optimistic confidence in what- 
ever was English were his in full measure. The very quali- 
ties that made Tennyson for a long time eclipse Browning 
made Macaulay eclipse Carlyle, and in both cases a nat- 
ural reaction set in. Critics called attention to the artifi- 
cial balance of Macaulay's sentences, and to the brazen ring 
of his verses ; they pointed out his blindness to much that 
is highest and purest in literature ; they convicted him of 
partisanship and made short work of his assumptions of 
omniscience. In all this they had considerable truth on 
their side, but as was natural they went to extremes, and 
the pendulum of opinion is now swinging in Macaulay's 
direction again. Mr. Matthew Arnold was right when he 
insisted on Macaulay's middle-class limitations, but he went 
too far when he practically denied that Macaulay had any 
claim to the title of poet. Schoolboys and older readers 
have not been entirely deluded when they have been car- 
ried away by the swing of Ivry and of Horatius, The 
essay on Milton has done good to thousands of readers, 
though its critical value is slight in the extreme. The third 
chapter of the History^ describing the England of 1685, 
remains one of the most brilliant pieces of historical narra- 
tion ever penned, no matter how partisan Macaulay may 
have been in the remainder of the work. However much 
his assumptions of omniscience may vex us, we must per- 
force admit that no modern specialist has ever known his 
peculiar subject better than Macaulay knew his chosen 
period of history, the reigns of James II. and William III. 
Theorize as much as we will about the pellucid beauties of 
an unelaborated style, we must confess that if the object of 
irriting be to reach and influence men, Macaulay's balanced, 



''. A( BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, vii 

* / *• 

^ antithetical style is one of the most perfect instruments of 
expression ever made use of by speaker or writer. We 
. Inay complain that Macaulay often leaves his subject and 
wanders off into space, but we have to confess with Mr. 
^ .../Saintsbury that he is one of the greatest stimulators of 
,^J« other minds that ever lived. In short we must conclude 
**«»,-that although the brilliant historian and essayist has no 
such claim to our veneration as a great poet like Words- 
worth, or a great novelist like Scott, or a great prophet like 
Carlyle, nevertheless his place is with the honored names of 
literature, and his fame is no proper subject for carping 
and ungenerous criticism. 

With regard now to his individual works the highest 
praise must of course be given to his History. In spite of 
its incompleteness and its partisan character it is plainly one 
of the most notable of the world's historical compositions. 
It yields to the great work of Gibbon, but it would be hard 
to name any other history in English that is its superior in 
what is after all the essential point, the art of narration. 
Macaulay claimed that his favorite Addison might have 
written a great novel, but the claim might better be made 
for Macaulay himself, since he was a born story teller. 
Unkind critics have intimated that he drew upon his imagi- 
nation for his characters, and the public has always con- 
fessed that the History is as interesting as a novel. We 
shall not, however, go so far as to maintain that the His- 
tory is a novel or that Lord Macaulay was a great novelist 
spoiled ; but we are at liberty to contend that the great 
secret of the historian's success lay in his comprehension of 
the fact that to make the past really live it must be treated 
in much the same way in which a novelist would treat the 
materials gathered for his story. 

Perhaps enough has been said about our author's scanty 
poetry, which appeals chiefly through its swing and vigor, 
but the Essays will naturally demand somewhat fuller 
treatment. Their main value lies probably in the stimula- 
tion they give to the intellectual powers of any reader who 



Viii MA CAUL AY. 

has a spark of literary appreciation or the slightest desire 
to learn. Macaulay's erudition is so great and he wears it 
so lightly that one is instinctively led to wish for a similar 
mental equipment, and to fancy that it cannot be very diffi- 
cult of attainment. Whatever Macaiilay likes is described 
in such alluring terms that a reader feels that vc would 
really be too bad for him not to know more about it. The 
truth of this statement is amusingly illustrated by an anec- 
dote, given in the Life and Letters, of a gentleman who 
after reading the review of Bunyan's Pilgrim^ s Progress 
sent a servant ^ter the book. Macaulay was sitting near 
him in the library of the Athenaeum Club and enjoyed the 
incident. But, besides their alluring style and their power 
of mental stimulation, the Essays have the advantage of 
treating in the main great subjects that people wish to know 
about, and treating them in such a way as to impart a large 
amount of compact and very useful information. Perhaps 
this is the chief reason why men who are self-educated are 
so familiar with Macaulay. Such readers care veiy little 
for the nicer shadings of criticism, but they do care a great 
deal to have available information and positive opinions 
furnished them on the great men and events of the past. 
Hence Macaulay's essay on Bacon will survive the monu- 
mental answer that Mr. Spedding gave it ; hence his essays 
on Clive and Warren Hastings will for generations supply 
the public with all the Indian history it is likely to demand. 
After the Milton Macaulay wrote about forty essays, all 
of which appeared in the Edinburgh except the five con- 
tributed to the Encyclopcedia Britannica. They fall into 
two main classes, literary and historical, with a few of 
miscellaneous character, such as that on Sadler's Law of 
Population. It is a striking proof of Macaulay's genius 
that they are nearly all as well worth reading to-day as 
they were when they appeared between the yellow and blue 
covers. As a rule a review is unreadable a few years after 
its appearance, as is proved by the dust that settles upon 
the volumes of such contemporaries of Macaulay's as Mack- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, ix 

intosh and Talfourd. Their reviews were duly collected 
into volumes and they were included with Macaulay among 
the " British Essayists," but they are dead while Macaulay 
lives. The quarterlies are still published, and their pon- 
derous reviews are read by leisurely people, and immedi- 
ately forgotten, for there is no form of literature that has 
less vitality. Yet Macaulay's reviews are still read by thou- 
sands and keep alive the names of books and men that 
would else have long since perished. It is a remarkable 
literary phenomenon. While Macaulay did not originate 
the discursive literary review, he first gave it life and popu- 
larity, and may be compared to a trunk that puts forth 
many branches. But the branches are all dead or dying, 
while the trunk seems to be endowed with perpetual life 
and vigor. Explain it as we may, the fact remains that 
the essays on Clive and Pitt and Warren Hastings, on Mil- 
ton and Addison and Johnson, on Barere and Mr. Robert 
Montgomery's Poems, although belonging by nature to the 
most ephemeral category of literature, are as fully entitled 
to be called classics as any compositions written in the Eng- 
lish language during the present century. 

Four of the best of these classical essays are included 
in this Series, and a careful study of them with the aid 
of the introductions and notes will initiate the student into 
much of the secret of Macaulay' s power and charm. He 
should not, however, rest content with them, but should 
read at least most of the Essays and the poems, and should 
then go on to complete the five volumes of the History, 
Even then he will not have all of Macaulay, for the two 
delightful volumes of the Life and Letters^ edited by Mr. 
Trevelyan, will remain to be enjoyed. Mr. Cotter Mori- 
son's excellent biography in the English Men of Letters 
will also be found worth perusing, and if a good analysis of 
the style of the great essayist be wanted, it can be had in a 
fhapter of Professor Minto's well known Manual of Eng* 
Ush Frose Literature. 



X BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

It is, of course, always desirable that even young students 
should know the most authoritative biographies of the au- 
thors they are studying, yet it is hardly practicable to ask 
them to read the whole of the two volumes of Trevelyan's 
Life and Letters of Macaulay. The following suggestions, 
however, may assist them in dipping into the great work at 
points where they cannot fail to* be interested. 

Volume I, chapter I, presents an amusing collection of 
anecdotes of Macaulay's childhood and early school days ; 
chapter II offers interesting reminiscences of his university 
life ; chapter III discusses the success of his earliest writ- 
ings and gives vivid glimpses of his appearance, character, 
and manners of life at that period. Chapter IV begins the 
review of Macaulay's political career and recounts with some 
spirit the reception of his Reform speeches ; a glimpse of 
Macaulay at home may be gained through the journal for 
1831 and 1832 largely quoted in this chapter. Chapter VI 
prints some of his vivid descriptions of his life and work in 
India. The Appendix to Volume I contains his pencil notes 
scribbled in his Latin and Greek books, which furnish the 
whole clue to the riddle of the breadth and depth of Macau- 
lay's reading. 

Volume II, chapter VII, contains some readable letters 
written during his travels through Italy, 1838-1839. Macau- 
lay's aptitude for the business of politics and his love of 
" being in the fight " are strongly presented in chapter VIII. 
In chapter IX we catch a glimpse of his literary workman- 
ship in the account of his writing of The Lays ; of his frank 
manner of criticising his contemporaries in literature ; of his 
manner as an orator. Chapter X contains a lively descrip- 
tion of Macaulay's political defeat in 1847, and prints in 
full the praiseworthy poem occasioned by this incident. 
The best discussion of his personality — his conversation, 
his memory, his dislike of society, his love for children, his 
zeal in collecting literary material and his methodical in- 
dustry in writing — appears in chapter XI. In chapter 



MACAULArS STYLE. xi 

XIII is an interesting extract from a London journal which 
gives the current opinion of Macaulay's powers as a Par- 
liamentary orator in 1853 ; there appear also some of the 
finest passages from his famous speech upon the second 
reading of the India Bill, and an account of the reception of 
the third and fourth volumes of his History of England, 
Chapter XIV recounts some laughable incidents of imposi- 
tions upon Macaulay's well-known and credulous generosity ; 
here also is the account of his being made a peer and 
of his inauguration as High Steward of the borough of 
Cambridge. In chapter XV are some amusing accounts 
of his tour through the Highlands, and a sympathetic 
description of his last days. 



MACAULAY'S STYLE. 

The characteristics of Macaulay's style are so aggres- 
sively obvious that the student hardly needs to have them 
pointed out to him. Still, the following outline may be of 
some assistance in making an orderly examination of the 
essay in hand. It will be of value, however, only as the stu- 
dent will search out and arrange for himself, from the text, 
illustrations of all the qualities which are noted. A much 
more detailed criticism will be found in J. Scott Clark's 
Study of English Prose Writers ; and a minute exposition 
of the rhetorical qualities of Macaulay's prose may be seen 
in William Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature. 

/ I. Rapidity ; abu:n^dance ; erudition. 

These qualities strike the reader before he has finished 
the first page. The abundance of Macaulay's thought 
and ideas, his equipment of facts, his historical, bio- 
graphical, and literary knowledge, all move along to- 
gether with. the irresistible momentum acquired by an 
great mass once projected into motion. And as it rushes 



xii MACAULArS STYLE. 

along it gathers up this fact, that date, this hit of 
gossip, that stray allusion, — like a great snowball that 
rolls up everything in its path. Examination will prove 
that Macaulay's memory is accurate, and he never 
needs to consult reference books. Irving tells us that in 
his debates with Hallam, Macaulay would quote chap- 
ters and sections as if he had a whole library of books 
before him. He seemed to forget nothing he had ever 
read, and he read everything, great or insignificant. 
'' His style was like a full-blooded steed on the race- 
course, fleet, direct, and of simple but splendid propor- 
tions." Leslie Stephen, 

11. Clearness; repetition. 

These two qualities apparently arise from Macaulay s 
consciousness of and consideration for his reader. He 
seems to take special pains to be intelligible. He re- 
peats an idea over and over again, and patiently makes 
those connections and explanations which galled Car- 
lyle. This habit, which sometimes becomes tiresome, 
has led many critics to speak of Macaulay as ^' the 
purveyor of knowledge to the middle class," " a short 
cut to learning," and the "bourgeois writer." Once, 
after a series of meetings in which his History of Eng- 
land had been read aloud, one of the members rose and 
moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Macaulay for having 
written a history which working-men could under- 
stand. 

" It seems as if he were making a wager with his 
reader, and saying to him, ' Be as absent in mind as 
you will, as stupid, as ignorant ; in vain you will be 
ignorant ; you shall learn, for I will repeat the idea in 
so many forms.' " Taine. 



MACAULArS STYLE. xm 

in. Genius for narrative ; for portraiture ; fob 

THE picturesque. 

The Essay on Johnson is a single story from beginning 
to end, told by a true story-teller, who moves straight 
ahead, knows how to select what is worth telling, how 
to add color here and emphasis there, and how to 
accelerate his movement to a climax at just the right 
points. Particularly he loves to sketch a portrait, and 
he can do it so that we know the man in an instant. 
He gives us the details of his dress, the tricks of his 
manner, the peculiarities of his face or figure, the sound 
of his voice, the tread of his footstep. Nothing illus- 
trates this power so well as the description of Johnson's 
personal appearance in the essay on BoswelVs Johnson, 
Whatever was picturesque attracted Macaulay strongly ; 
and to whatever was dull or colorless he would, if he 
needed it, give a color and life all his own. 

"The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's 
place on popular book shelves is that he has a true 
genius for narration. . . . His firmness and directness 
of statement, his spiritedness, his art of selecting salient 
and highly colored detail . . . keep the listener's atten- 
tion and make him the easiest of writers to follow." 
Morley, 

" He tells what people said, what they did, how they 
looked, what visions passed through their imaginations, 
and leaves the particulars of their state of feeling to be 
inferred from these material indications. Carlyle repre- 
sents Johnson ' with his great greedy heart and un- 
speakable chaos of thoughts ; stalking mournful on this 
earth, eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could 
come at.' Macaulay represents hiili with more of con- 
crete circumstances : ' ransacking his father's shelves,' 
' devouring hundreds of pages,' ' treating the academi- 
cal authorities with gross disrespect,' standing ' under 



xiv MA CAUL ATS STYLE. 

the gate of Pembroke, haranguing a circle of lads, over 
whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his 
wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency.' " 
Minto, 

IV. Sacrifice op accuracy to form and effect. 

So great is Macaulay's love of broad, sweeping state- 
^mept, and of keeping up a contrast or a likeness, that 
^Hfcften, to gain his ends, must sacrifice a bit of the 
truth. He likes to draw things with bold, sharp out- 
lines ; the delicate shadings and fine-drawn distinctions 
which accuracy demands he has no aptitude for. " In 
his judgments all men are either black or white." This 
means, of course, extreme exaggeration for the sake of 
capturing an effect. 

'' In seeking for paradoxes he often stumbles on, but 
more frequently stumbles over the truth." Gilfillan. 

V. Love of antithesis; of climax; of imagery. 

Macaulay's determination to arouse the attention of 
his readers leads him to use profusely those forms of 
expression which stimulate and surprise. He is con- 
tinually balancing words, phrases, sentences ; he is 
always leading us to expect a certain state of affairs 
and then turning us with a " but " to a result quite dif- 
ferent ; he is ready at any moment with an epigram. 
Every sentence throbs with emphasis, and the emphasis 
always falls in the right place without use of printer's 
devices. A favorite form of emphasis with him is the 
climax. His paragraphs are as periodic as his sen- 
tences ; we leave the climax at the end of one only to 
gather for a fresh start in the next. Figures of speech, 
especially in the earlier essays, are frequent and bold ; 
some critics hold many of them tawdry and common- 
place, but all are vigorous and original. 

'' His words overflow with antithetical forms of ex- 



MACAULAY'S STYLE. XV 

pression and thoughts condensed into sparkling epi- 
grams. His page is brightened by them, gleaming over 
the discussion of a question of taste like incessant 
flashes of heat lightning — thrown off like glittering 
sparks in the rush of his declamatory logic." Whipple. 
" From another pen such masses of ornament would 
be tawdry ; with him they are only rich. . . . He 
embellishes the barrenest subject." Gladstone. 

VI. Self-confidence ; prejudice ; invective. 

Macaulay's self-assurance has gained him the reputa- 
tion of being " cock-sure " about all matters which he 
discusses. He never hesitates to pass a judgment upon 
any one or any thing. These judgments are often par- 
tisan, for he seldom digs deeply enough into his subject 
to root up all his own prejudices. His politics colored 
everything he wrote. As Shirly says, '' Lord Macaulay 
was a great man, but he was a great Whig man." And 
yet there was a sort of boyish honesty about his preju- 
dices which is forgivable. The most unforgivable thing 
about them is that they too often lead him into bitter 
invective, and to the use of words and expressions 
which are mean in themselves. 

" It is overweeningness and self-confident will that 
are the chief notes of Macaulay's style." Morley. 

'' His was a partiality for some characters amounting 
to favoritism ; a hatred for others amounting to fury." 
Gilfillan. 

" When he hates a man he calls him knave or fool 
with unflinching frankness." Leslie Stephen. 

VII. Drawbacks of his brilliancy. 

Macaulay's brilliancy and power made of him too hur- 
ried a thinker. He took but little time to weigh and 
analyze and search into the hidden aspects of his sub- 



xvi STRUCTURE OF ESSAY ON JOHNSON. 

jects. His mind was so active and energetic that it 
abhorred rest or delay. 

'' Compare him with a calm, meditative, original 
writer like De Quincey, and you become vividly aware 
of his peculiar deficiency, as well as his peculiar 
strength ; you find a more rapid succession of ideas 
and greater wealth of illustration, but you miss the 
subtle casuistry, the exact and finished similitudes, and 
the breaking up of routine views. No original opinion 
requiring patient consideration or delicate analysis is 
associated with the name of Macaulay. It better suited 
his stirring and excitable nature to apply his dazzling 
powers of expression and illustration to the opinions of 
others." Minto, 



THE STRUCTURE AND FORM OF THE ESSAY 
ON JOHNSON. 

The Essay on Johnson follows its theme, the life and 
works of Samuel Johnson, with the directness of a straight- 
forward narrative which never once loses sight of its main 
character, and follows only one single thread of interest. 
Compared with the Essay on Milton^ the simplicity of its 
structure, its almost total lack of deliberate, conscious ar- 
rangement, becomes at once apparent. It lacks the formal 
introduction, the elaborate conclusion, and the careful pro- 
portioning and massing of parts which that earlier essay 
of Macaulay 's shows. Here a different treatment was de- 
manded, it is true, for the essay was written as a biographi- 
cal sketch for the Encyclopedia Britannica ; but in part its 
directness must be laid to the precision and strength which 
had come to its writer through years of experience. It is 
the simple order of actual events that determines Macaulay's 
arrangement of the Essay on Johnson ; and his knowledge of 
the eighteenth century and his honest conviction that Johnson 



STRUCTURE OF ESSAY ON JOHNSON, xvli 

was its great central figure keeps its subject dominant over 
all related subjects with a supremacy that makes for the 
simplest and clearest form of unity. In general the essay 
may be said to be based upon the following fundamental 
topics ; — 

I. Johnson's Early Life, H 1-8. 

II. Johnson's Early Struggles in London, H 9-13. 

III. Johnson's Early Literary Work, IT 14-22. 

IV. The Period of Success, 1[ 23--33. 
V. The Period of DecUne, 1[ 34-49. 

VI. Last Years and Death, IT 50, 51. 
VII. Assured Position of Johnson, IT 52 (conclusion). 

A glance shows, then, that the essay lacks a formal intro- 
duction, that its discussion proceeds upon the simple order of 
time, that its divisions are natural divisions of Johnson's life, 
that its unity is firm, that it presents a brief, plain conclusion. 
These main topics, however, are supported by related topics, 
varying in importance, and treated with different degrees 
of length, emphasis, and elaboration. It is a valuable exer- 
cise, and a simple and practical one, to make out the lists of 
these supporting topics and so complete the brief, as it were, 
of the whole essay. Then is one convincingly impressed 
with the firmness and directness of Macaulay's plan, and 
enabled to see what topics, full of interest to him, aroused 
him to his most brilliant style. Almost unconsciously in this 
way one grasps the form of each paragraph, — its unity, its 
climax, its manner of developing its central idea, and gets 
a bird's-eye view of the variety of paragraph form and 
length as controlled by the variety of matter under discus- 
sion. 

For a further examination of Macaulay's paragraphs, 
sentences, words, and figures of speech one can do no better 
than to base his study, point by point, upon Professor Minto's 
discussion of Macaulay's style in his Manual of English 
Prose Literature, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

For a study of Macaulay's life and literary work the 
following books and essays are recommended : — 

Biographical : — 

Trevelyan, G. O. Life and Letters of Macaulay. 
Morrison, J. C. Macaulay (English Men of Letters). 
Stephen, Leslie. Macaulay (Dictionary of National 
Biography). 

Critical : — 

Minto, W. English Prose Literature. 

Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. 

Bayne, P. Essays in Biography and Criticism, 

Bagehot, W. Literary Studies. 

Saintsbury, G. Impressions, 

Henley, W. E. Views and Reviews. 

Morley, John. Miscellanies. 

Oliphant, Mrs. Victorian Age of English Literature. 

Whipple, E. P. Essays and Reviews. 

NicoU, H. J. Landmarks of English Literature. 

Gilfillan, G. Literary Portraits. 

For a further study of Johnson the following are con- 
venient books of reference : — 

Stephen, Leslie. Samuel Johnson (English Men of 
Letters). 

Grant, F. Samuel Johnson (Great Writers Series). 

Seccombe, T. The Age of Johnson. 

Madame Piozzi. Anecdotes of Dr, Samuel Johnson. 

Birrell, A. Samuel Johnson, in Obiter Dicta. 

Landor, W. S. Imaginary Conversation between Samuel 
Johnson and John Home Tooke. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY. XlX 

Carlyle, T. Essay on BoswelVs Life of Johnson (a reply 
to Macaulay's essay). 

Hill, G. Birkbeck. Dr. Johnson^ his Friends and his 
Critics, 

Stephen, Leslie. Boswell (Dictionary of National Bio- 
graphy). 

The Johnson Club Papers. (The Johnson Club was 
formed December 13, 1884, at the " Cock " Tavern, Fleet 
Street, London, on the one hundredth anniversary of John- 
son's death. Meetings of the club were held four times a 
year at the " Cock," or perhaps at Pembroke or Lichfield, 
and at these were read the papers here collected, — all 
devoted to matters of interest connected with Johnson.) 

For students' use. Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Bos- 
welVs Life of Johnson gives the fullest information and 
comments, but probably Napier's edition will be found quite 
as convenient for reference. 

The following books give interesting data concerning 
places in London associated with Johnson's name : — 

Hutton, L. Literary Landmarks of London. 

Wheatley and Cunningham. London, Past and Present. 

Lemon, M. Up and Down the London Streets. 

Hare, A. Walks in London. 

Besant, W. London. 

Johnson's own writings may be consulted in the following : 

The Vanity of Human Wishes^ and London^ in Hale's 
Longer English Poems. 

Basselas, edited by Professor F. W. Scott ; or by Dr. G. 
Birkbeck Hill ; or by O. F. Emerson. 

Essays from The Rambler and The Idler, in Dr. G. 
Birkbeck Hill's Select Essays of Samuel Johnson. 

Lives of the Poets, in Six of the Lives of the Poets, edited 
by Matthew Arnold. 

Prayers and Meditations, composed by Samuel Johnson, 
collected by George Strahan. Lately reprinted in New 
York. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel John- 
son : a copy of the early editions, either the folio or the 
"Abstracted edition by the author," will furnish the student 
with all the amusement which Macaulay bespeaks for the 
hour spent in turning over its pages. 

The Complete Works of Johnson may be found in any 
good library. The best edition is that of 1825, which is so 
excellent that, with the exception of an ^dition-de-luxe, no 
new edition has been called for since. The most scholarly 
edition of The Lives of the Poets is that by G. Birkbeck 
Hill (3 vols.) ; he has also edited Johnson's Letters, John^ 
son Miscellanies (2 vols.), and BoswelVs Life of Johnson. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

The Essay on Johnson, like those on Goldsmith and Bunyan, 
first appeared in the eighth edition of the Encyclopcedia Bri- 
tannica and is still to be found there. The editors of the new 
edition were wise in retaining what is not only in all probability 
the best of Macaulay's essays, but also one of the finest biograph- 
ical sketches in any language. The praise which Macaulay gave 
perhaps too generously to Johnson's Life of Richard Savage 
should really be reserved for his own masterly account of the 
great Doctor's life and writings. One might almost bestow 
upon it the praise he gave to BoswelFs Life, if compositions of 
essentially different kinds could be profitably compared. The 
secret of Macaulay's success is not far to seek, however much 
one may despair of equalling his performance. He knew his 
subject thoroughly and sympathized with him, and, as Matthew 
Arnold said, was for the nineteenth very much the sort of man 
that Dr. Johnson was for the eighteenth century. In addition 
his limited space kept him from being too discursive, and his 
years of practice enabled him to give to his style a precision and 
strength and pliability that, in the Essays at least, it had not 
hitherto attained. Both in substance and in form, then, this 
miniature biography, for such it is, represents Macaulay at his 
very best. It is needless to say more of it and it is equally need- 
less to discuss Dr. Johnson when Macaulay has practically said 
the last word about him. Industrious editors like Dr. Birk- 
heck Hill will continue to annotate Bos well and to bring small 
facts to light, but if they are wise they will not obscure the 
full-sized portrait that the inquisitive little Scotchman painted. 
Criticism of Johnson's works and an endeavor to give them 
greater currency is, of course, another matter, and such volumes 
as Matthew Arnold's selected Lives of the Poets may be thor- 
oughly recommended. Complete editions of Johnson's works 
are not often published, but copies of existing editions are easily 
obtained, and Rasselas, at least, is to be had in almost any form. 



2 MACAULAY. 

The latest modern lives are by Mr. Leslie Stephen in the Eng' 
lish Men of Letters and by Colonel Grant in the Great Writers. 
For a more explicit study of points in the essay, the reader 
will find Woodrow Wilson's The State, Hallam's Literature of 
Europe, Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth 
Century, and Lord Mahon's History of England under Queen 
Anne convenient books of reference. 



f 



f(f^ 



\^ ^ 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminejit Eng- 
lish writers of the eighteenth century, was the son ®f 
Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that 
century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller 
of great note in the midland counties. Michael's 
abilities and attainments seem to have been consider- 
able. He was so well acquainted with the contents 
of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the 
country rectors ^ of Staffordshire and Worcestershire 
thought him an oracleon points of learning. Be- 
tween him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong 
religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous 
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for 
municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns 
in possession, was to the last a Jaco bite in heart. At 
his house, a house which is still pointed out to every 
traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 
18th of September, 1709. In the child, the physical, 
intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards 
distinguished the man were plainly dfeeernible, — 
great muscular strength accompanied by much awk- 
wardness and many infirmities; great quickness of 
parts, ^ with a morbid propensity to sloth and procras- 

^ Country rectors were often marvellously ignorant in those 
days and earlier. See in Fielding's Joseph Andrews the charao 
ter of Parson Trulliber. 

2 That is, of mental endowments. 



4 MACAULAY. 

tination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy 
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his 
ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the 
power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak 
enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific 
for this malady. In his third year he was taken up 
to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed 
over by the court chaplains, and stroked and pre- 
sented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of 
his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in 
a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her 
hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which 
were originally noble and not irregular, were dis- 
torted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply 
scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye, and 
he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the 
force of his mind overcame every i mpediment . Indo- 
lent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease 
and rapidity that at every school to which he was 
sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen 
to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his 
own devices. He learned much at this time, though 
his studies were without guidance and without plan. 
He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a mul- 
titude of books, read what was interesting and passed 
over what was dull. 'An ordinary lad would have 
acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way, 
but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interest- 
ing to Samuel. He read little Greek, for his profi- 
ciency in that language was not such that he could 
take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry 
and eloquence. But he had left school a good Lat- 
inist, and he soon acquired, in the large and miscel- 
laneous library of which he now had the command. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 5 

an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That 
Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the 
great public schools ^ of England he never possessed. 
But he was early familiar with some classical writers 
who were quite unknown to the best scholars in the 
sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by 
the works of the great restorers of learning. ^ Once, 
while searching for some apples, he found a huge 
folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited 
his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hundreds of 
pages. Indeed, the ,dictiQ]Q and vgrsification of his 
own Latin compositions show that he had paid at 
least as much attention to modern copies from the 
antiq ue as to the original models. 
""While he was thus irregularly educating himself, 
his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old 
Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore 
upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in 
them. His business declined; his debts increased; 
it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his 
household were defrayed. It was out of his power 
to support his son at either university,^ but a wealthy 
neighbor offered assistance, and, in reliance on prom- 
ises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel 
was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When 
the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of 

^ That is, schools like Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, which are not 
*^ public " in the American sense, but are supported by endow- 
ments and fees. 

2 That is, the leaders of the Renaissance, Petrarch, Erasmus, 
Sir Thomas More, Colet, etc. 

* There were only two universities then in England, Oxford 
and Cambridge, and in popular opinion there are only two now, 
though London, Durham, and Yictoria have been added witbin 



6 MA CAUL AY. 

that society,^ they were amazed not more by his un- 
gainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quan- 
tity of extensive ^and curious information which he 
had picked up during many months of desultory but 
not unprofitable study. On the first day of his resi- 
dence, he surprised his teachers by quoting Macro- 
bius; 2 and one of the most learned among them 
declared that he had never knov/n a freshman of 
equal attainments. 

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three 
years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his 
appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were 
equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was 
driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the 
sneering looks which the members of that aristo- 
cratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some 
charitable person placed a new pair at his door, but 
he spurned them away in a fury. rDistrefij& made 
him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. ^No 
opulent gentleman commoner,^ panting for one and 
twenty, could have treated the academical authorities 
with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was 
generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a 
gate now adorned with his effigy, ^.haranguing a circle 
of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and 

^ An English college is an endowed and incorporated associa- 
tion of students. Its rulers are the Master (or Warden, etc.) 
and the fellows. 

^ Died 415 a. d., author of a miscellaneous collection of 
antiquarian and critical pieces entitled Saturnalia, but best known 
for his commentary on the famous Scipid's Dream of Cicero. 

^ One paying all charges and not dependent on the college 
funds for support. 

* Pembroke (founded 1624) has had many other distinguished 
sons — e. g. Shenstone, Blackstone, and Whitefield. 



V 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 7 

dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undis- 
puted ascendency. In every mutiny against the dis- 
cipline of the college, he was the ringleader. Much 
was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distin- 
guished by abilities and acquirements. He had early 
made himself known by turning Pope's "Messiah " ^ 
into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were 
not exactly Virgilian ; but the translation found many 
admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope him- 
self. 

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in 
the ordinary course of things, have become a bach- 
elor of arts; but he was at the end of his resources. 
Those promises of support on which he had relied had 
not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. 
His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, 
yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 
he was under the necessity of quitting the univer- 
sity without a degree. In the following winter his 
father died. The old man left but a pittance, and 
of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated 
to the support of his widow. The property to which 
Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty 
pounds. 

His life during the tM rty yeaT §^ which followed 
was one hard stru^g^le with pove rty. The misery of _-^ ' 
that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggra- 
vated by the sufferings oF'an unsound body and an /^ 
unsound mind. Before the young man left the uni- \) 

^ This poem, first published in The Spectator for May 14, 1712, 
was in imitation of Virgil's Pollio (Eclogue lY.), and is one of 
the best of Pope's early works. The concluding lines have fur- 
nished us with one of the most familiar of modern hymns ; — 
*' R'se, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise ! " 




8 MACAULAY. 

versity, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a 
singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable 

v' hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been 
n^H^aH Eis life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, 
in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often 
been thought, grounds sufficient for absolving felons 
and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his ges- 
tures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and some- 
times ter^rified people who did not know him. At a 
dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down 

v^ and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a 
drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the 
Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible 
aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great 
circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would 
,, set his heart on touching every post in the streets 
through which he walked. If by any chance he 
missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards 
and repair the omission. Under the influence of his 
disease, his senses became morbidly torpid and his 
imagination morbidly active. At one time he would 
stand poring on the town clock without being able to 
tell the hour. At another he would distinctly hear 
his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by 
his name. But this was not the worst. A deep mel- 
ancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge 
to all his views of human nature and of human des- 
tiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven 
many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. 
But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. 

-^ i He was sick of life, but he was afraid of death ; j and 
lie shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded 
him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but 
little comfort during his long and fretjuent fits of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 9 

dejection, for his religion partook of his own charac- 
ter. vThe light from heaven shone on him indeed, 
but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splen- 
dor.) The rays had to struggle through a disturbing 
medium: they reached him refracted, dulled, and 
discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on 
his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently clear 
to guide him, were too dim to cheer him. 

With such infirmities of body and of mind, this 
celebrated man was left, at two and twenty, to fight 
his way through the world. He remained during 
about five years in the midland counties. At Lich- 
field, his birthplace and his early home, he had in- 
herited some friends and acquired others. He was 
kindly noticed by Henry Hervey,^ a gay officer of 
noble family, who happened to be quartered there. 
Gilbert Walmesley,^ registrar of the ecclesiastical 
court of the diocese, — a man of distinguished parts, 
learning, and knowledge of the world, — did himseK 
honor by patronizing the young adventurer, whose 
repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid 
garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the 
neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. At Lich- 
field, however, Johnson could find no way of earning 
a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school^ 
in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion 
in the house of a country gentleman ; ^ but a life of 

^ Born in 1700 ; brother of Lord John Hervey. 
2 (1680-1751). At the end of his Life of the poet Edmund 
Smith, Johnson paid a noble tribute to this early friend. 

* That is, assistant master in a school in which Latin and 
Greek were the chief studies. The school was that of Mairket 
Bos worth. He became usher in July, 1732. 

* Sir Wolstan Dixie, patron of the school. 



f)/ 



10 MA CAUL AY. 

dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. 
He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few 
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he 
printed a translation, little noticed at the time and 
long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. ^ 
He then put forth proposals for publishing by sub- 
scription the poems of Politian,^ with notes containing 
a history of modern Latin verse; but subscriptions 
did not come in, and the volume never appeared. 

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, 
Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was 
Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children 
as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady 
appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted 
half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond 
of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were 
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.^ 
To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, 
whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse 
from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never 
been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, 
his Tetty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, 
graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his ad- 
miration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she 
was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readi- 
ness which did her little honor, the addresses of a 

^ This was not a Latin book, but a French translation of a 
work by Lobo (1593-1678), a Portuguese Jesuit. 

^ Politian (Angelo Ambrogini, 1454-1494) was one of the 
most brilliant scholars and teachers of the Renaissance. He not 
only succeeded in Latin verse, but was also an able Italian poet. 

^ Mary Lepel (1700-1768), who married Lord John Hervey, 
author of the Memoirs of the Court of George II., and Catherine 
Hyde (died 1777), afterwards Duchess of Queensberry, were 
noted beauties of the period, and friends of Pope and Gay. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 11 

suitor who might have been her son. The marriage, 
however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved 
happier than might have been expected. The lover 
continued to be under the illusions of the wedding 
day till the lady died, in her sixty -fourth year. On 
her monument he placed an inscription extolling the 
charms of her person and of her manners; and when, 
long after her decease, he had occasion to mention 
her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half l udicrou s, 
half pathetic, "Pretty creature! " 

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert 
himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done.^ 
He took a house in the neighborhood of his native 
town, and advertised for pupils. ^ But eighteen 
months passed away, and only three pupils came to 
his academy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, 
and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must 
have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry, 
painted grandmother whom he called his TEHy well 
qualified to make provision for the comfort cf young 
gentlemen. David Garrick,^ who was one of the 
pupils, used many years later to throw the best com- 
pany of London into convulsions of laughter by mim- 
icking the endearments of this extraordinary pair. 

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of 
his age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital 
as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few 

^ The marriage was performed July 9, 1735, at Derby, though 
Mrs. Porter lived at Birmingham, to which place Johnson had 
returned. 

2 In 1736. 

2 The great actor (1716-1779), from whom many of the un- 
pleasing details about Mrs. Porter were, as Macaulay intimates, 
obtained by Boswell. 



12 MA CAUL AY. ^ 



fs, 



guineas, three acts of the tragedy of "Irene" in 
majiuscript, and two or three letters of introduction 
im his friend Wahnesley. 

Never since literature became a calling in England 
had it been a less gainful calling than at the time 
when Johnson took up his residence in London. In 
the preceding generation, ^ a writer of eminent merit 
was sure to be munificently rewarded by the govern- 
ment. The least that he could expect was a pension 
or a 4p^c^^^ place; and, if he showed any aptitude 
for politics, he might hope to be a member of Parlia- 
ment, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secre- 
tary of state. ^ It would be easy, on the other hand, 
to name several writers ^ of the nineteenth century, of 

- whom the least successful has received forty thousand 
pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered 
on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary 

^ interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Lit- 
erature iiad ceased to flourish under the patronage 
of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the 
patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, 
Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then consid- 
ered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing 
of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But 
this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose 
reputation was established, and whose works were pop- 
ular — such an author as Thomson,* whose " Seasons '^ 

1 That is, the reigns of William III. and Anne. See the 
essay on Addison. 

2 With regard to literary men who rose in politics, the stu- 
dent should remember that Steele was a member of Parliament, 
Prior an ambassador, and Addison a secretary of state. 

^ For example, Scott, Byron, Macaulay. 

* For James Thomson, the poet (1700-1748) and Henry Field- 
ing (1707-1754), the great novelist, see Gosse. Fielding's early 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 13 

were in every library; such an author as Fielding, 
whose "Pasquin" had had a greater run than any 
drama since the ^^ Beggar's Opera "^ — was some- 
times glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the 
means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, 
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, 
on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, there- 
fore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must 
have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. 
One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for 
employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic 
though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, ''You had 
better get a porter's knot^ and carry trunks." Nor 
was the advice bad, for a porter was likely to be as 
plentifully fed and as comfortably lodged as a poet. 

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson 
was able to form any literary connection from which 
he could expect more than bread for the day which 
was passing over him. He never forgot the gener- 
osity with which Hervey, who was now residing in 
London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. 
''Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many 
years later, "was a vicious man, but he was very 
kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love 
him." At Hervey's table, Johnson sometimes enjoyed 

work was as a dramatist, but none of his plays, including the 
satiric comedy mentioned, is read to-day, except possibly his 
Tragedy of Tragedies, a parody which celebrates Tom Thumb. 

^ A famous parody on the Italian opera, written by John Gay 
(1685-1732) on a hint from Swift. It was produced in 1728, 
and had an immense run, its chief characters representing high- 
waymen and pickpockets. For Gay, whose Fables and Black- 
eyed Susan are still read, and who was a delightful man, see 
Gosse. 

2 A pad worn on the head. 



14 MACAULAY, 

\ 4L feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. 
X/put in general he dined, and thought that he dined 
'well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a pennyworth 
of bread at an alehouse near Drury Lane.^ 

The effect of the privations and sufferings which 
V he endured at this time was discernible to the last in 
ihis temper and his deportment. His manners had 
never been courtly. They now became almost sav- 
age. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing 
shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed 
sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down 
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with 
ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, 
and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food 
affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of 
prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean 
ordinaries^ and alamode beef shops, ^ was far from 
delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have 
near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a 
meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself 
with such violence that his veins swelled and the 
moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts 
which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded 
men to offer to him, would have broken a mean spirit 
into sycophancy, but made him rude even to fero- 
city. Unhappily, the insolence which, while it was 
defensive, was pardonable and in some sense respect- 

^ A famous street (not then or now aristocratic) in the heart 
of London. The student may consult books by Hare, Loftie, 
and Sir Walter Besant, in order to learn something about historic 
London. 

2 Eating houses, where a fixed rate is charged for meals. 

^ Where- beef a la mode (i. e,, larded with spices, vegetables, 
wine, etc.) was sold. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 15 

able, accompanied him into societies where he was 
treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeat- 
edly provoked into striking those who had taken 
liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were 
wise enough to abstain from talking about their beat- 
ings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal 
of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he 
had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he 
had hired to puff the Harleian Library.^ 

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in 
London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular 
employment from Cave,^ an enterprising and intelli- 
gent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of "The 
Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just entering 
on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only 
periodical work in the kingdom which then had what 
would now be called a large circulation. It was, 
indeed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. 
It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish 
an account of the proceedings of either House without 
some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain 
his readers with what he called " Eeports of the De- 
bates of the Senate of Lilliput."^ France was Ble- 
fuscu; London was Mildendo; pounds were sprugs; 

^ A famous collection of books and manuscripts made by Rob- 
ert Harley, Earl of Oxford (1661-1724), the rival of Marlbor- 
ough and Godolphin, and bought by Osborne, who hired Dr. 
Johnson to assist in cataloguing it. 

2 Edward Cave (1691-1754), under the name of " Sylvanus 
Urban,*' founded, in 1731, The Gentleman's Magazine (which is 
still running, though changed in plan, and the back volumes of 
which are a mine of miscellaneous information). Johnson wrote 
a good Latin ode to him, and a short sketch of him. 

^ This and the following queer names are taken from Gulli-' 
ver^s Travels. For an account of how news was circulated at this 
period, and earlier, see Macau! ay's History, chap. iii. 



16 MACAULAY. 

the Duke of Newcastle ^ was the Nardac secretary of 
state; Lord Hardwicke was the Hugo Hickrad; and 
William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write 
;he speeches was, during several years, the business 
of Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes 

— meagre indeed and inaccurate — of what had been 
«aid; but sometimes he had to find argument and elo- 
quence, both for the ministry and for the opposition. 
He was himself a Torj^^ot from rational conviction, 

— for his serious opinion was, that one foum of gov- 
.ernment was just as good or as bad asanother, — but 
from mere passion, such as inflamed tfie^ Capulets 
against the Montagues,^ or the Blues of the Roman 
circus against the Greens.^ In his infancy he had 
heard so much talk about the villanies of the Whigs 
and the dangers of the Church, that he had become 
a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. 
Before he was three, he had insisted on being taken 
to hear Sacheverell^ preach at Lichfield Cathedral, 

1 Thomas Pelham. For this fatuous statesman (1693-1768) 
see Macaulay's essays on Pitt and Chatham. Philip Yorke, 
Earl of Hardwicke (1690-1764), was a famous Lord Chancellor. 
William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (1682 ?-1764), was a leader of 
a Whig faction against Walpole. 

2 See Romeo and Juliet. 

3 See Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. xl. The drivers in the 
Roman circus wore liveries, — white, red, green, and blue, — 
and the populace took sides according to colors. Many riots 
resulted, and the feuds were transferred to Constantinople, 
where the great Nika riots of 532 A. D. took place. 

4 The Rev. Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1672-1724) was a foolish 
High Churchman, who in 1709 preached two sermons of an 
intemperate character against the Whigs. He was impeached, 
tried by the Peers, and found guilty, with the natural result that 
he became a hero with the Tories, and had not a little to do 
with the Whig downfall. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 17 

and had listened to the sermon with as much re- 
spect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any 
Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work 
which had been begun in the nursery had been com- 
pleted by the university. Oxford, when Johnson 
resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in Eng- 
land ; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical 
colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought 
up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of 
his own Tom Tempest.^ Charles II. and James II. 
were two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud, 
a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote any- 
thing indicating more than the ordinary capacity of 
an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning, 
over whose tomb Art and Genius ^ still continued to 
weep. Hampden ^ deserved no more honorable name 
than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the 
ship money, condemned not less decidedly by Falk- 
land ^ and Clarendon ^ than by the bitterest Round- 
heads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an 
unconstitutional impost. Under a government the 
mildest that had ever been known in the world, under J 
a government which allowed to the people an unpre- 
cedented liberty of speech and action, he fancied that 
he was a slave ; he assailed the ministry with obloquj^ . 

1 See Johnson's Idler^ No. 10. 

2 See The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1. 173. 

^ John Hampden (1594-1643), the famous Puritan states- 
man, who resisted the ship-money tax, and^was killed in a skir- 
mish with the Royalists. 

* Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland (1610?-1643), poet, scholar, 
and one of the noblest of Charles I.'s adherents. See Matthew 
Arnold's essay on him. 

^ The great Lord Chancellor and historian. 



18 MACAULAY. 

which refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom 
and happiness of those golden days in which a writer 
who had taken but one tenth part of the license al- 
lowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled with 
the shears, whipped at the cart's tail,^ and flung into 
a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and 
stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial par- 
liaments, and continental connection s.^ He long had 
an aversion to the Scotch, — an aversion of which he 
could not remember the commencement, but which, 
he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence 
of the conduct of the nation during the Great Eebel- 
lion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on 
great party questions were likely to be reported by 
a man whose judgment was so much disordered by 
party spirit. A show of fairness was, indeed, neces- 
sary to the prosperity of the magazine. But Johnson 
long afterwards owned that, though he had saved 
appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs 
should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every 
passage which has lived, every passage which bears 
the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the 
mouth of some member of the opposition.^ 

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these 
obscure labors, he published a work which at once 
placed him high among the writers of his age. It is 

1 Obsolete methods of punishment. 

2 All objects of Tory invective. Dissenters, of course, were op- 
posed to the church; stockjobbers to the landed interests; the ex- 
cise was favored by Walpole ; the array was due to William III. ; 
limiting the duration of Parliament (to seven years) was a Whig 
measure ; connections with foreign countries, especially with Hol- 
land, formed a part of Whig policy, — though Johnson would 
have done well to remember the Treaty of Dover. 

8 That is, the Tories, the party out of power. 






SAMUEL JOHNSON. 19 

probable that what he had suffered during his first 
year in London had often reminded him of some 
parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal ^ had de- 
scribed the misery and degradation of a needy man 
of letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tot- 
tering garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. 
Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's "Satires" 
and "Ej)istles " had recently appeared, were in every 
hand, and were by many readers thought superior to 
the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, John- 
son aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was 
bold, and yet judicious. For between Johnson and 
Juvenal there was much in common,^ — much more, 
certainly, than between Pope and Horace. 

Johnson's ''London " appeared without his name in ^ 
May^^J^JSS. He received only ten guineas for this 
stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid 
and the success complete. A second edition was re- 
quired within a week. Those small critics who are 
always desirous to lower established reputations ran 
about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was 
superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department 
of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the 
honor of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause 
irtrith which the appearance of a rival genius was wel- 
comed. He made inquiries about the author of "Lon- 
don." Such a man, he said, could not long be con- 
cealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope, 
with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an 
academical degree, and the mastership of a grammar 

^ Juvenal's third satire is meant. Dry den had translated it, 
along with four others, and Oldham had applied it to London 
as Boileau had done to Paris. 

2 For example, a certain severity of temper and morals. 



20 MA CAUL AY. 

school, for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, 
and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack. 
. It does not appear that these two men — the most 
eminent writer of the generation which was going 
out, and the most eminent writer of the generation 
which was coming in — ever saw each other. They 
lived in very different circles, — one surrounded by 
dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers 
and index-makers. Among Johnson's associates at 
this time may be mentioned Boy^e,^ who, when his 
shirts were pledged, scrawled Lrftin verses, sitting up 
in bed with his arms through two holes in his blan- 
kets, who composed very respectable sacred poetby 
when he was sober, and who was at last run over by 
a hackney coach when he was drunk; Hoole^^ sur- 
named the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of^'attend- 
ing to his measures, used to trace geometrical dia^ 
grams on the board where he sat cross-legged; a^ 
the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar,fywho, 
after poring all day, in a humble lodging, ^n the 
folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, in- 
dulged himself at night with literary and theological 
conversation at an alehouse in the city. But the 
most remarkable of the persons with whom at this 
^ time Johnson consorted was Richard Savage,* an 

1 Samuel Boyse (1708-1749). 

2 Uncle of John Hoole, the translator of Tasso and Ariosto, 
who was also a friend of Johnson. 

3 The famous impostor (1679 ?-1763), who pretended to be a 
native of Formosa, and wrote an account of that island which 
imposed on a great many people. He was born in France, but 
kept his real name concealed. 

^ (1698-1743), reputed to be the illegitimate son of the Coun- 
tess of Macclesfield. He was a poet interesting rather as fore- 
shadowing future tendencies of English verse than as writing 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 21 

earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen 
life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue rib- 
bands in St. James's Square,^ and had lain with fifty 
pounds' weight of irons on his legs in the condemned 
ward of Newgate.^ This man had, after many vicis- 
situdes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hope- 
less poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons 
had been taken away by death, or estranged by the 
riotous profusion with which he squandered their 
bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he 
rejected their advice. He now lived by begging. He 
dined on venison and champagne whenever he had 
been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his 
questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage 
of hunger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay 
down to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden ^ in 
warm weather, and in cold weather as near as he 
could get to the furnace of a glasshouse.* Yet, in his 
misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He 
had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that 
gay and brilliant world from which he was now an out- 
cast. He had observed the great men of both parties 
in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders 
of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had 
heard the prime minister ^ roar with laughter and tell 

an}i:hiiig worth the general reader's attention. But the student 
should by all means read Johnson's Life of him. 

1 That is, with Knights of the Garter, in one of the most aris- 
tocratic quarters of London. 

2 The noted prison. 

3 Originally ** Convent " Garden, best known through its mar- 
ket and theatre. 

* Sometimes a conservatory, though the word is here used foi 
^ glass-works." 

* Sir Robert Walpole. 



22 MACAULAY. 

stories not over-decent. During some months, Say- 
age lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson ; and 
then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson 
remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage 
went to the west of England, lived there as he had 
lived everywhere, and in 1743 died, penniless and 
heart-broken, in Bristol jail. 

^Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was 
trongly excited about his extraordinary character 
and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of 
him appeared, widely different from the catchpenny 
lives of eminent men which were then a staple article 
of manufacture in Grub Street.^ The style was, in- 
deed, deficient in ease and variety; and the writer 
was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our 
language. But the little work, with all its faults, 
was a masterpiece. No finer specimen of literary 
biography^ existed in any language, living or dead; 
and a discerning critic might have confidently pre- 
dicted that the author was destined to be the founder 
of a new school of English eloquence. 
. _ The Life of Savage was anonymous, but it was 

\^ well known in literary circles that Johnson was the 
^ writer. During the three years which followed, he 
produced no important work ; but he was not, and 
indeed could not be, idle. The fame of his abilities 
and learning continued to grow. Warburton^ pro- 

^ A street ** much inhabited by writers of small histories, 
dictionaries, and temporary poems ; whence any mean produc- 
tion is called grubstreet." Johnson's Dictionary. 

2 Does this mean a biography considered as a piece of litera- 
ture, or a biography of a literary person ? If the former, the 
praise will seem extravagant to those who admire the Agricola 
of Tacitus. 

^ The famous William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucesteii 



«\ 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 23 

nounced him a man of parts and genius, and tlie 
praise of Warburton was then no light thing. Such 
was Johnson's reputation that in 1747 several emi- 
nent booksellers combined to employ him in the ardu- 
ous work of preparing a "Dictionary of the English^ v 
Language," in two folio volumes. The sum which 
fliey agreed to payhim was only fifteenhundred_^uin- 
eas, and out of t^(S sum he had^o pay several poor 
men of letters ,w)u) assisted him in the humbler parts 
of his task. ^j^'. 

^The Prospei^tus of the Dictionary he addressed to 
the Earl of Chesterfield.^ Chesterfield had long been 
celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the bril- 
liancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He 
was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the 
House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, 
at a momentous conjuncture,^ with eminent firmness, 
wisdom, and humanity; and he had since become 
secretary of state. He received Johnson's homage 
with the most winning affability, and requited it with 
a few guineas, bestowed, doubtless, in a very grace- 
ful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all 
his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his 

(1698-1779), a noted controversialist and dogmatic critic whose 
reputation, immense during his lifetime, has dwindled almost to 
nothing. 

1 The Earl of Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1694- 
1773) is chiefly renowned as a man of fashion, and as the author 
of a series of Letters to his son which is still a classic manual 
of conduct. Johnson remarked of this famous book that it 
taught the morals of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing- 
master. Chesterfield was an accomplished diplomat, and fore- 
saw the coming of the French Revolution. 

2 As Lord Lieutenant about 1745. He kept down factions and 
bribery, and established schools and manufactories. 



24 MA CAUL AY. 

soups and wines thrown to right and left over the 
gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gen- 
tlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave 
strange starts and uttered strange growls, — who 
dressed like a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant. 
During some time Johnson continued to call on his 
patron,^ but, after being repeatedly told by the porter ^>v 
that his lordship was not at home, took the hint, and ^ 
ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door. ;< 

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have ■ 
completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750, but it^ v, 
was not till 1755 that he at length gave his huge vol- ^^ 
umes to the world. During the seven years which 
he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and ' 
marking quotations for transcription, he sought for 
relaxation in literary labor of a more agreeable kind. ^ 
In 1749 he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," r\ 
an excellent imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. 
It is In truth not easy to say whether the palm be- 
longs to the ancient or to the modern poet. The 
couplets^ in which the fall of Wolsey is described, 
though lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared 
with the wonderful lines which bring before us all 

^ Down to the time of Pope, and later, the patron, a noble- 
man or other distinguished personage who would pay for the 
honor of a dedication, was necessary to the author, and was 
celebrated with a flattery that seems loathsome to us now. For- 
tunately, the growth of a reading public has relieved authors 
from this shameful necessity, a consummation toward which 
the stand taken by Pope and Johnson led the way. 

2 Lines 99-128. The student will do well to compare with 
the Latin original (11. 56-80), and with the famous passage in 
Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Both London and The Vanity of 
Human Wishes are given with useful annotation in Hales's Longer 
'Hnglish Poems. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 25 

Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of Sejanus ; i 
the laurels on the doorposts ; the white bull stalking 
towards the Capitol; the statues rolling down from 
their pedestals ; the flatterers of the disgraced minister 
rimning to see him dragged with a hook through the 
streets, and to have a kick at his c^-rcass before it is 
hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned, too, that 
in the concluding passage the Christian moralist has 
not made the most of his advantages, and has fallen 
decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. 
On the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield 
to Johnson's Charles; ^ and Johnson's vigorous and 
pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a literary life ^ 
must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamenta- 
tion over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero. 

For the copyright of " The Vanity of Human 
Wishes " Johnson received only fifteen guineas. 

A few days after the publication of this poem, his 
tragedy, begun many years before, was brought on 
the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had in 1741 
made his appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's 
Fields,^ had at once risen to the first place among 
actors, and was now, after several years of almost 
uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane The- 

^ The infamous minister of the Emperor Tiberius, whose fate 
had previously given Ben Jonson the subject for a tragedy. See 
Capes's Early Roman Empire in the Epochs series. Macaulay is 
paraphrasing Juvenal. 

2 That is, the great Charles XII. of Sweden. 

8 " Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol." 

The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1. 160. 

Johnson's satires have furnished several familiar quotations, 
and are strong, though by no means great poems. 
* Near the Tower. 



26 MAC A UL AY. 

atre.^ The relation between him and his old precep- 
tor was of a very singular kind. {They repelled each 
other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly.) 
Nature had made them of very different clay, and 
circumstances had fully brought out the natural pecu- 
liarities of both.V Sudden prosperity had turned Gar- 
rick's head. VContinued adversity had soured John- 
son's temper."^ Johnson saw, with more envy than 
became so great a man, the villa, the plate, the 
china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had 
got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations, 
what wiser men had written; and the exquisitely sen- 
sitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought 
that, while all the rest of the world was applauding 
him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose 
opinion it was impossible to despise, scarcely any 
compliment not acidulated with scorn. Yet the two 
Lichfield men had so many early recollections in com- 
mon, and sympathized with each other on so many 
points on which they sympathized with nobody else 
in the vast population of the capital, that though the 
master was often provoked by the monkey-like im- 
pertinence of the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish 
rudeness of the master, they remained friends till 
they were parted by death. Garrick now brought 
"Irene" out, with alterations sufficient to displease 
the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleas- 
ing to the audience. The public, however, listened, 
with little emotion but with much civility, to five 
acts of monotonous declamation. After nine repre- 
sentations^ the play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, 

^ Drury Lane Theatre was opened in 1674 with an address by 
Dryden. It has been several times rebuilt and is still used — 
ehiefly for pantomimes. 



^ "'"• SAMUEL JOHNSON. 27 

altogether unsuited to the stage, and, even when 

perused in the closet, will be found hardly worthy of 

the author. He had not the slightest notion of what 

blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable 

of every other line would make the versification of 

^"The Vanity of Human Wishes" closely resemble 

^^he versification of "Irene." ^ The poet, however, 

;;;;vcleared by his benefit nights, ^ and by the sale of the 

^ copyright of his tragedy, about three hundred pounds, 

then a great sum in his estimation.^ 

^•V^About a year after the representation of " Irene, '^ 

e began to publish a series of short essays on morals, 

anners, and literature. This species of composition 

ad been brought into fashion by the success of "The 

atler," and by the still more brilliant success of 

The Spectator."* A crowd of small writers had 

Vainly attempted to rival Addison. "The Lay Mon- 

1 The subject of Johnson's tragedy is the passion of the Sul- 
tan Mahomet (the Great) for a beautiful Greek slave, Irene. 
Macaulay's criticism seems eminently just. The student need 
not be a master of the technicalities of blank verse in order to 
feel that Johnson could not write it ; a feeling which will be 
strengthened by a perusal of the papers on Milton's versification 
contributed to The Rambler. 

2 The author seems to have received the profits of every 
third night's performance. See Boswell, who gives many in- 
teresting details about the performance. Johnson took his disap- 
pointment philosophically. 

^ Macaulay naturally has little more to say about Johnson as 
a poet. The Doctor's greatness did not lie that way, but his two 
satires, his elegy on Levet (see post), and one or two epitaphs 
and impromptus should be read by the serious student. Of the 
Latin poems the lines to Cave are excellent, and the version of 
Pope's Messiah is good. 

^ See the essay on Addison, also Gosse, and, better still, read 
selections from both papers, which originated in the fertile brain 
of Steele, but were made classical by Addison. 




28 MA CAUL AY. 

astery," "The Censor,'^ "The Freethinker," "The 
Plain Dealer," "The Champion," ^ and other works of 
the same kind, had had their short day. None of them 
had obtained a permanent place in our literature; 
and they are now to be found only in the libraries of 
the curious. At length Johnson undertook the ad- 
venture in which so many aspirants had failed. In 
the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last 
number of "The Spectator," appeared the first num- 
ber of "The Eambler."2 From March, 1750, to 
March, 1752, this paper continued to come out every 
Tuesday and Saturday. 
/^\y From the first, "The Rambler " was enthusiastically 
admired by a few eminent men. Eichardson,^ when 
only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, 
if not superior, to "The Spectator." Young and 
Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly. 
Bubb Dodington ^ — ^ among whose many faults indif- 

1 The Lay Monastery ran from Nov. 16, 1713, to Feb. 15, 
1714, under the direction of Sir Richard Blackmore and Mr. 
Hughes. The Censor, three volumes, appeared in 1717 under 
Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic. The Freethinker ran 
for 159 numbers, Mar. 24, 1718, to Sept. 28, 1719, under 
Ambrose Philips. The Plain Dealer ran for 117 numbers. Mar. 
27, 1724, to May 7, 1725, under Aaron Hill. The Champion, two 
volumes, appeared in 1741, and was directed by no less a person- 
age than Henry Fielding. 

2 Johnson with his accustomed piety composed a special prayer 
for success on this occasion. The exact dates of the paper are 
Tuesday, March 20, 1750, to Saturday, March 14, 1752, — 208 
numbers, all but about five of which were by Johnson. 

^ Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), practically the first English 
novelist, author of Pamela, etc. Johnson preferred him to 
his younger rival. Fielding. Richardson himself wrote No. 97 
of The Rambler, 

* The famous author of Night- Thoughts, Dr. Edward Young 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 29 

ference to the claims of genius and learning cannot be 
reckoned — solicited the acquaintance of the writer. 
In consequence, probably, of the good offices of Dod- 
ington, who was then the confidential adviser of 
Prince Frederick, two of his Koyal Highness 's gen« 
tlemen carried a gracious message to the printing- 
office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester House. ^ 
But these overtures seem to have been very coldly 
received. Johnson had had enough of the patronage 
of the great to last him all his life, and was not dis- 
posed to haunt any other door as he had haunted the 
door of Chesterfield. 

By the public "The Rambler" was at first very 
coldly received. Though the price of a number was 
only twopence, the sale did not amount to five hun- 
dred. The profits were therefore very small. But 
as soon as the flying leaves were collected and re- 
printed, they became popular. The author lived to 
see thirteen thousand copies spread over England 
alone. Separate editions were published for the 
Scotch and Irish markets. A large party pronounced 
the style perfect, — so absolutely perfect that in some 
essays it would be impossible for the writer himself 
to alter a single word for the better. Another party, 
not less numerous, vehemently accused him of hav- 
ing corrupted the purity of the English tongue. The 
best critics admitted that his diction was too monot- 

(1681-1765), David Hartley (1705-1757), the metaphysician, 
and George Bubb Dodington (Lord Melcombe, 1691-1762), a 
much talked of, and not very highly esteemed, courtier whom 
Browning has made the subject of one of his Parleyings. 

^ The residence of the Prince of Wales, who quarreled with 
his father, George II. Frederick (1707-1751) was the father of 
Georffe III. 



MACAULAY. 

onous, too obviously artificial, and now and then 
turgid even to absurdity. But tLey did justice to the 
acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, 
to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of 
^his language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence 
of many serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleas- 
ing humor of some of the lighter papers. On the 
question of precedence between Addison and Johnson, 
\ — a question which, seventy years ago, was much 

^^ disputed, — posterity has pronounced a decision from 
which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain 
and his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, 
X^ the Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citi- 
>^ zen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the 
Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit to the- Ex- 
change, and the Visit to the Abbey, are known to 
everybody.^ But many men and women, even of 
highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted with 
Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Ve- 
nustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the 
Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad 
fate of Anningait and Ajut. 
. ^ The last '' Rambler " was written in a sad and 
gloomy hour. Mrs. Johnson had been given over by 
the physicians. Three days later she died. She left 
her husband almost broken-hearted. Many people 
had been surprised to see a man of his genius and 
learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying 
himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of sup- 
plying a silly, affected old woman with superfluities, 
which she accepted with but little gratitude. But 

1 " Dunmow Flitch " is Macaiilay's own and not entirely 
accurate title for Nos. 607, 608 of The Spectator, which are not 
certainly by Addison. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 31 

all his affection had been concentrated on her. He 
had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daugh- 
ter. To him she was beautiful as the Gunnings,^ and 
witty as Lady Mary.^ Her opinion of his writings 
was more important to him than the voice of the pit 
of Drury Lane Theatre, or the judgment of " The 
Monthly Review." The chief support which had 
sustained him through the most arduous labor of his 
life was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and 
the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary, 
She was gone ; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, 
peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, 
he was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set 
himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to work. After 
three more laborious years, the Dictionary was at 
length complete. 

* <^ It had been generally supposed that this great work 
would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished 
nobleman to whom the Prospectus had been ad- 
dressed. He well knew the value of such a com- 
pliment; and therefore, when the day of publication 
drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of 
zealous and at the same time of delicate and judicious 
kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded* 
Since the "Ramblers" had ceased to appear, the 
town had been entertained by a journal called "The 

1 Elizabeth (1734-1790) and Maria Gunning (1733-1760) 
were famous beauties, afterwards the Duchess of Hamilton and 
Countess of Coventry respectively. 

2 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), known to Pope 
and his set as " Lady Mary," was a small poetess better known 
for her wit and her talents as a letter writer. She originated 
the famous characterization of Pope as " the wicked wasp of 
Twickenham." She also introduced inoculation into Europe, 



32 MA CAUL AY. 

World," to which many men of high rank and fash- 
ion contributed.^ In two successive numbers of "The 
World " the Dictionary was, to use the modern 
phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of 
Johnson were warmly praised. It was proposed that 
he should be invested with the authority of a dictator, 
nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his deci- 
sions about the meaning and the spelling of words 
should be received as final. His two folios, it was 
said, would of course be bought by everybody who 
could afford to buy them. It was soon known that 
these papers were written by Chesterfield. But the 
just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased. 
In a letter 2 written with singular energy and dig- 
nity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy 
advances of his patron. The Dictionary came forth 
without a dedication. In the preface the author truly 
declared that he owed nothing to the great, and de- 
scribed the difficulties with which he had been left to 
struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest 
and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, 
Home Tooke,^ never could read that passage without 
tears. 
\^<rhe public, on this occasion, did Johnson full jus- 
tice, and something more than justice. The best 

1 Edited by Edward Moore (1712-1757), a forgotten poet. 
Chesterfield and Horace Walpole wrote for it, and it ran from 
Jan. 4, 1753, to Dec. 30, 1756 (209 numbers). 

2 See Boswell for this justly famous letter. 

3 John Home (1736-1812), who subsequently added the name 
Tooke, is famous as a politician tried for high treason but 
acquitted, as a philologist whose Diversions of Purley is still 
read, and as a conversationalist who rivaled Johnson himself. 
The passage over which he wept is the concluding paragraph of 
the Preface. 



SA MUEL JOHNSON. 33 

lexicogra]3her may well be content if his productions 
are received by the world with cold esteem. But 
Johnson's Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm 
such as no similar work has ever excited. It was, 
indeed, the first dictionary which could be read with 
pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of 
thought and command of language, and the passages 
quoted from poets, divines, and philosophers are so 
skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be 
very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. ^ The 
faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most 
part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched 
etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teu- 
tonic language except English, which, indeed, as he 
wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language ; and thus 
he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skin- 
ner.2 

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, 
added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen 
hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to 
pay him had been advanced and spent before the last 
sheets issued from the press. It is painful to relate 
that, twice in the course of the year which followed 

^ Some of the definitions are famous for their humor ; in 
others Johnson showed his political bias, e. g., Lexicographer^ 
a harmless drudge, and Excise, a hateful tax. 

2 Francis Junius (1589-1677, of Huguenot extraction) and 
Stephen Skinner (1623-1667) were scholars who studied the 
Teutonic languages {i. e., Gothic, German, Scandinavian, Eng- 
lish, etc.) at a time when little was known of them. Junius is 
especially entitled to praise for his work in Anglo-Saxon., 
Macaulay's criticism is just, but Johnson, in consideration of 
the general ignorance with regard to etymology, should not be 
anduly censured. See Boswell for an amusing account of the 
Doctor's methods of work. 



34 MA CAUL AY. 

the publication of this great work, he was arrested 
and carried to sponging-houses, and that he was twice 
indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Rich- 
ardson. It was still necessary for the man who had 
been formally saluted by the highest authority as dic- 
tator of the English language to supply his wants by 
constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He pro= 
posed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by sub- 
scription, and many subscribers sent in their names, 
and laid down their money; but he soon found the 
task so little to his taste that he turned to more at- 
tractive employments. He contributed many papers 
to a new monthly journal which was called " The 
Literary Magazine."^ Few of these papers have 
much interest, but among them was the very best 
thing that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of rea- 
soning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of 
Jenyns's^ "Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of^" 
Evil/ ^ ^ - -^' 

^J\ In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first 
of a series of essays entitled "The Idler." During 
two years these essays continued to appear weekly. 
They were eagerly read, widely circulated, and, in- 
deed, impudently pirated while they were still in the 
original form, and had a large sale when collected 
into volumes. "The Idler" may be described as a 
second part of "The Rambler," somewhat livelier and 
somewhat weaker than the first part.^ 

^ Founded in 1756, and lasted about three years, chiefly on 
Johnson's reputation. 

^ Soanie Jenyns (1704-1787), a small poet, member of Parlia- 
ment, and author of the above-named book, the style of wliich 
was much admired. 

* The first number appeared Saturday, April 15, 1758; the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 36 

^^ While Johnson was busied with his "Idlers," his 
mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year, 
died at Lichfield. It was long since he had seen her ; 
but he had not failed to contribute largely, out of his 
small means, to her comfort. In order to defray the 
charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which 
she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, 
and sent off the sheets to the press without reading 
them over, ^[^^^^^hun dred jp5u5tg 3^£^ P^^^ ^^ ^^^ 
the copyright; and the purchasers had great cause 
to be pleased with their bargain, for the book was 
"Ea^els^."! Z^^" ? 

The success of "Rasselas" was great, though such 
ladies as Miss Lydia Languish ^ must have been 
grievously disappointed when they found that the new 
volume from the circulating library was little more 
than a dissertation on the author's favorite theme, 
the vanity of human wishes ; that the Prince of Abys- 
sinia was without a mistress, and the princess without 
a lover; and that the story set the hero and the hero- 
ine down exactly where it had taken them up. The 
style was the subject of much eager controversy. " The 
Monthly Keview" and "The Critical Review "^ took 

103d and last appeared Saturday, April 5, 1760. Johnson 
wrote all except perhaps twelve. The increased liveliness may 
even be seen in the fictitious names, which are no longer Latin 
as in The Rambler, but homely English, — such as Dick Linger, 
Betty Broom, and Deborah Ginger. Between The Rambler and 
The Idler Johnson wrote twenty-nine papers for The Adventurer 
of his friend. Dr. Ha wkes worth, — so that, all told, he wrote 
nearly two hundred and twenty-five essays. 

1 Rasselas, or the Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is the best known 
of Johnson's prose works after the Lives of the Poets. 

2 A well-known character in Sheridan's Rivals. 

s Set up by the Tories in 1756, under the editorship of Smol« 
lett, as a rival to the Monthly (1749), which was Whig. "^ 



36 MACAULAY. 

diiSferent sides. Many readers pronounced the writer 
a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of 
two syllables where it was possible to use a word of 
six, and who could not make a waiting-woman relate 
her adventures without balancing every noun with 
another noim and every epithet with another epithet. 
Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight 
numerous passages in which weighty meaning was 
expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splen- 
dor. And both the censure and the praise were 
merited. 

i^y About the plan of "Rasselas" little was said by 
the critics, and yet the faults of the plan might seem 
to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently 
blamed Shakespeare for neglecting the proprieties of 
time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation 
the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shake- 
speare has not sinned in this way more grievously 
than Johnson. Easselas and Imlac, Nekayah and 
Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of 
the eighteenth century, for the Europe which Imlac 
describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; 
and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly 
of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, 
and which was not fully received, even at Cambridge,^ 
till the eighteenth century. What a real company of 
Abyssinians would have been may be learned from 
Bruce's^ "Travels." But Johnson, not content with 

^ Newton was a Cambridge man, and that university has been 
famous for mathematics, hence the use of " even." 

2 James Bruce (1730-94), the celebrated African traveler, 
whose Travels appeared in 1790 in five quarto volumes. The 
student will recall Johnson's early interest in the Abyssinians and 
his translation of Lobo. 



^ 



'h 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 37 

turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters and 
gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into 
philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself 
or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly ac- 
complished as Mrs. Lennox 1 or Mrs. Sheridan,^ 
transferred the whole domestic system of England to 
Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, 
a land where women are married without ever being 
seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies of 
our ball-rooms. In a land where there is boundless 
liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indis- 
soluble compact. "A youth and maiden meeting hj 
chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange 
glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of 
each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common 
process of marriage." Such it may have been, and 
may still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. 
A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had 
little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote 
Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flourish- 
ing in the days of the oracle of Delphi.^ 
vBy such exertions as have been described, Johnson 

1 Mrs. Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) was the author of The 
Female Quixote, a novel of some vogue, and a woman for whom 
Johnson seems to have had considerable respect. 

2 Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1724-1766), the mother of the great 
dramatist and author of two novels. 

^ See Troilus and Cressida, II. ii., and A Winter's Tale, V. ii. 
Giulio Romano (1492-1546) was a distinguished Italian painter, 
a pupil of KaphaePs. Macaulay's criticism of Rasselas is just 
in the main, but in spite of all its faults the storj, like many 
another classic, retains a hold upon readers through the general 
appeal of its central theme and the soundness of its ethical 
content. Still Johnson was a moralist rather than a story- 
teller, though he actually tried his hand on a fairy tale ( The 
Fountains^, 



38 MACAULAY. 

supported himself till the year 1762. In that year 
a great change in his circumstances took place. He 
had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dy- 
nasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited 
with little disguise both in his works and in his con- 
versation. Even in his massy and elaborate Diction- 
ary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judg- 
ment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections on 
the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite 
resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a 
hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners 
of excise in language so coarse that they had seri- 
ously thought of prosecuting him. He had with diffi- 
culty been prevented from holding up the lord privy 
seal ^ by name as an example of the meaning of the 
word "renegade." A pension he had defined as pay 
given to a state hireling to betray his country; a 
pensioner, as a slave of state hired by a stipend to 
obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author 
of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But 
that was a time of wonders. George III. had as- 
cended the throne,^ and had, in the course of a few 
months, disgusted many of the old friends, and con- 
ciliated many of the old enemies, of his house. The 
city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becoming 
loyal. ^ Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. 

1 The keeper of the seal affixed to less important documents 
and to grants that are afterwards to pass under the great seal 
(kept by the Lord Chancellor). The lord privy seal is a mem- 
ber of the cabinet with little work to do. The keeper referred 
to was Lord Gower, whom Johnson regarded as a renegade be- 
cause he gave up the Jacobite party. 

2 In 1760. 

2 That is, to the Hanoverians. It has always been loyal, and 
clung to the Stuarts as long as possible. 



^ SAMUEL JOHNSON. 39 

Somersets and Wyndhams^ were hastening to kiss 
hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord 
Bute, 2 who was a Tory, and could have no objection 
to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought 
a patron of men of letters, and Johnson was one of 
the most eminent and one of the most needy men 
of letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a 
year was graciously offered, and with very little hesi- 
tation accepted. 

^his event produced a change in Johnson's whole 
way of life. For the first time since his boyhood, he 
no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily 
toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety 
and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, 
to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up 
talking till four in the morning, without fearing 
either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. 
^^ One laborious task, indeed, he had bound himself 
to perform. He had received large subscriptions for 
his promised edition of Shakespeare; he had lived 
on those subscriptions during some years; and he 
could not, without disgrace, omit to perform his part 
of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him 
to make an effort, and he repeatedly resolved to do 
so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his 
resolutions, month followed month, year followed 
year, and nothing was done. He prayed fervently 
against his idleness; he determined, as often as he 
received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze 
away and trifle away his time; but the spell under 

^ Representative Whig and Tory families respectively. 

2 John Stuart, Earl of Bute (1713-1792), became premier in 
1762. For a good sketch of his incompetent administration see 
Macaulay's essay on Chatham. 



40 MA CAUL AY. 

which he lay resisted prayer and sacramento His 
private notes at this time are made up of self- 
reproacheso "My indolence," he wrote on Easter 
Eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A 
kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that 
I know not what has become of the last year." Eas- 
ter, 1765, came, and found him still in the same 
state. "My time," he wrote, "has been unprofitably 
spent, and seems as a dream that has left nothing 
behind. My memory grows confused, and I know 
not how the days pass over me."^ Happily for his 
honor, the charm which held him captive was at 
length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He 
had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a 
story about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock 
Lane, 2 and had actually gone himself, with some of 
his friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's 
Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a com- 
munication from the perturbed spirit. But the 
spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained 
obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that a 
naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by 
making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill,^ 
who, confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, 
and burning with party spirit, was looking for some 
man of established fame and Tory politics to insult, 
celebrated the Cock Lane ghost in three cantos, nick- 

^ Johnson's prayers and meditations were collected and pub- 
lished by George Strahan in 1785. 

^ See a chapter in Andrew Lang's recent book, Cock Lane and 
Common SensCo Doctor Johnson really assisted in detecting the 
imposture, so that Macaulay is unjust to him. 

* Charles Churchill (1731-1764), a satirist of ability, whose 
vicious life was much talked of and is still remembered against 
him. 



\ SAMUEL JOHNSON. 41 

named Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was 
which had been so long promised and so liberally 
paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of 
cheating.^ This terrible word proved effectual; and 
in October, 1.765^ appeared, after a delay of nine 
years, the new edition of Shakespeare. 
'i^This publication saved Johnson's character for 
honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities 
and learning. The preface, though it contains some 
good passages, is not in his best manner. ^ The most 
valuable notes are those in which he had an opportu- 
nity of showing how attentively he had, during many 
years, observed human life and human nature. The 
best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius.^ 
Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meis- 
ter's^ admirable examination of Hamlet. But here 
praise must end. It would be difficult to name a 
more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great 
classic. The reader may turn over play after play 
without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or 
one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a pas- 
sage which had baffled preceding commentators. 
Johnson had, in his Prospectus, told the world that 

^ Churcliill's The Ghost was in four books. "Pomposo " is de- 
scribed in Book II., 11. 653-688. In Book III., 11. 799 seq., the 
Shakespeare matter is brought in : — 

** How, for integrity renown'd, 
Which booksellers have often found, 
He for subscribers baits his hook, 
And takes their cash — but where 's the book ? " 

Doctor Johnson said of this satire that he thought Churchill a 
shallow fellow in the beginning, and had seen no reason for 
altering his opinion. 

^ This judgment will not pass unquestioned. 

^ See Hamlet. 

^ By Goethe — Wilhelm Meister^a Lehrjahre, IV. xiii. 



42 MA CAUL AY. 

he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had 
undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been 
under the necessity of taking a wider view of the 
English language than any of his predecessors. That 
his knowledge of our literature was extensive, is in- 
disputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether 
neglected that very part of our literature with which 
it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakespeare 
should be conversant. T It is dangerous to assert a 
negative. \ Yet little will be risked by the assertion 
that in tne two folio volumes of the English Dic- 
tionary there is not a single passage quoted from 
any dramatist of the Elizabethan age except Shake- 
speare and Ben.^ Even from Ben the quotations are 
few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, have 
niade himself well acquainted with every old play that 
was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to 
him that this was a necessary preparation for the 
work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless 
have admitted that it would be the height of absurd- 
ity in a man who was not familiar with the works 
of ^schylus and Euripides to publish an edition of 
Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition 
of Shakespeare without having ever in his life, as far 
as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massin- 
ger, Ford, Dekker, Webster, Marlowe, Beaumont, or 
Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous. 
Those who most loved and honored him had little to 
say in praise of the manner in which he had dis- 
charged the duty of a commentator. He had, how- 

^ Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Macaulay practically gives a 
list of the chief Elizabethan dramatists (omitting Middleton, 
Peele, and one or two others), for whom the student may consult 
Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Literature. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. * 43 

ever, acquitted himseK of a debt which had long lain 
heavy on his conscience, and he sank back into the 
repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. 
tee long continued to live upon the fame which he 
had already won. \ He was honored by the Univer- 
sity of Oxford with a doctor's degree,^ by the Royal 
Academy 2 with a professorship, and by the King 
with an interview, in which his Majesty most gra- 
ciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer 
would not cease to write. ^ In the interval, however, 
between 1765 and 1776, Johnson published only two 
or three political tracts,^ the longest of which he could 
have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked 
as he worked on the Life of Savage and on "Eas- 
selas." 
. y^But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was 
active. The influence exercised by his conversation, 
directly upon those with whom he lived, and indirectly 
on the whole literary world, was altogether without 
a parallel. His cjol loquial ^talents were, indeed, of 
the highest order. He had strong sense, quick dis- 
cernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of litera- 
ture and of life, and an infinite store of curious anec- 
dotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than 
he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his 

1 In 1755, just before his Dictionary was published, Oxford 
gave him an M. A. Dublin gave him the degree of LL. D. in 
1765, Oxford ten years later that of D. C. L. 

^ The Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds being its first president. Johnson was made Professor 
in Ancient Literature, — an honor without salary. 

3 In February, 1767, " in the library at the queen's house." 
See BoSwell. 

^ For example, The False Alarm ; The Patriot ; Taxation no 
Tyranny, etc. 



44 MA CAUL AY. 

lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely 
balanced period of "The Eambler." But in his talk 
there were no pompous triads, and little more than 
a fair proportion of words in "osity" and "ation." 
All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered his 
short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power 
of voice and a justness and energy of emphasis of 
which the effect was rather increased than diminished 
by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic 
gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his elo- 
quence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which 
made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent 
him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. 
To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, 
in language so exact and so forcible that it might 
have been printed without the alteration of a word, 
was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, 
as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. 
He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full 
mind on anybody who would start a subject, — on 
a fellow-passenger in a stage-coach, or on the person 
who sat at the same table with him in an eating- 
house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant 
and striking as when he was surrounded by a few 
friends ^ whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, 
as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball 
that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed them- 
selves into a club,2 which gradually became a formid- 

^ It was so with Addison. See the essay on him. 

2 It met at the Turk's Head, Soho, and was called the Literary 
Club after Garrick's death. Macaulay gives the names of all 
the original members save those of Burke's father-in-law, Dr. 
Nugent, Mr. Anthony Chatnier, and Sir John Hawkins (who 
wrote a life of Johnson). The club has been continued and 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 45 

able power in the commonwealth of letters. The 
verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books 
were speedily known over all London, and were suffi- 
cient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to con- 
demn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker 
and the pastry cook. Nor shall we think this strange 
when we consider what great and various talents and 
acquirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith 
was the representative of poetry and light literature ; 
Reynolds, of the arts; Burke, of political eloquence 
and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, 
the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest lin- 
guist, of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings 
his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mim- 
icry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. 
Among the most constant attendants were two high- 
born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together 
by friendship, but of widely different characters and 
habits, — Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill 
in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, 
and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham Beau- 
clerk,^ renowned for his amours, his knowledge of 
the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic 

Macaulay in Trevelyan's Life and Letters gives a pleasant account 
of attending a meeting of it. It maybe noted that in 1749 John- 
son had started a club which contained, however, no such celeb- 
rities. The idea of the great Club came from Sir Joshua. 

^ Of this list the names of Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds 
(1723-1792), Burke, Gibbon (1737-1794), and Garrick are too 
familiar, or ought to be, to require a note. Macaulay says enough 
of Langton (1737-1801, who succeeded Johnson at the Royal 
Academy) and Beauclerk (1739-1780) ; and the student may 
look up the career of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), whose work 
as a jurist and oriental linguist is of very high importance. His 
poem What constitutes a State should also be read. 



46 MA CAUL AY, 

wit. To predominate over such a society was not 
easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predomi- 
nated. Burke might, indeed, have disputed the su- 
premacy to which others were under the necessity of 
submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very 
patient listener, was content to take the second part 
when Johnson was present; and the club itself, con- 
sisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popu- 
larly designated as Johnson's Club. 

Among the members of this celebrated body was 
one to whom it has owed the greater part of its celeb- 
rity, yet who was regarded with little respect by his 
brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a 
seat among them. This was James Boswell,^ a young 
Scotch lawyer, heir to an honorable name and a fair 
estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, 
vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all 
who were acquainted with him. That he could not 
reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no eloquence, 
is apparent from his writings. And yet his writings 
are read beyond the Mississippi and under the South- 
ern Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the 
English exists, either as a living or as a dead lan- 
guage. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. 
His mind resembled those creepers which the bot- 
anists call parasites, and which can subsist only by 
clinging round the stems, and imbibing the juices, 
of stronger plants. He must have fastened himself 
on somebody. He might have fastened himself on 
Wilkes,^ and have become the fiercest patriot in the 

1 1740-1795. 

2 John Wilkes (1727-1797), the notorious demagogue, editor 
of The Nm-th Briton. The society mentioned by Macaulay was 
founded to help Wilkes in his struggle with Parliament. See 
the essay on Chatham. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 4^1 

Bill of Eights Society. He might have fastened 
himseK on Whitefield,^ and have become the loudest 
field-preacher among the Calvinistic Methodists. In 
a happy hour he fastened himself on Johnson. The 
pair might seem ill-matched. For Johnson had early 
been prejudiced against BoswelFs country.^ To a 
man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable 
temper, the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell 
must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a 
fly. Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell 
was eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, 
and sometimes propounded such questions as, "What 
would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower 
with a baby?" Johnson was a water-drinker and 
Boswell was a wine-bibber, and, indeed, little better 
than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there 
should be perfect harmony between two such compan- 
ions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked 
into fits of passion, in which he said things which the 
small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. 
Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During 
twenty years, the disciple continued to worship the 
master;^ the master continued to scold the disciple, 
to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends 
ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. 
Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edin- 
burgh, and could pay only occasional visits to Lon- 
don. During those visits, his chief business was to 
watch Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to 
turn the conversation to subjects about which John- 

1 George Whitefield (1714-1770), the famous revivalist. 

2 Scotland. Cf . his well-known definition of oats as a grain 
used as food for horses in England but for people in Scotland. 

8 Boswell first met Johnson in 1763. 



48 MA CAUL AY. 

son was likely to say something remarkable, and to 
fill quarto note-books with minutes of what Johnson 
had said. In this way were gathered the materials 
out of which was afterwards constructed the most 
interesting biographical work in the world. 

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed 
a connection less important, indeed, to his fame, but 
much more important to his happiness, than his con- 
nection with Boswell. Henry Thrale — one of the 
most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound 
and cultivated und^standing, rigid principles, and 
liberal spirit — was parried to one of those clever, 
kind-hearted, engagii%, vain, pert young women who 
are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly 
right, but who, do or say what they may, are always 
agreeable.^ In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted 
with Johnson, and the acquaintance ripened fast into 
friendship. They were astonished and delighted by 
the brilliancy of his conversation. They were flat- 
tered by finding that a man so widely celebrated pre- 
ferred their house to any other in London. Even the 
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilized 
society — his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, 
his mutterings, the strange way in which he put on 
his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he de- 
voured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of 
anger, his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity 
— increased the interest which his new associates 

J Mrs. Thrale was Hester Lynch Salisbury (1741-1821). She 
married Thrale in 1763, and after his death, in 1781, was fasci- 
nated by Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian music-teacher, and married 
him (1784). In 1786 she issued her valuable Anecdotes of Dr. 
Johnson. She was a voluminous writer besides and a small 
poetess. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 49 

took in him. For these things were the cruel marks 
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict 
with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar hack 
writer, such oddities would have excited only disgust ; 
but in a man of genius, learning, and virtue, their 
effect was to add pity to admiration and esteem. 
Johnson soon had an apartment at the brewery in 
Southwark,^ and a still more pleasant apartment at 
the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. ^ A 
large part of every year he passed in those abodes, — 
abodes which must have seemed magnificent and luxu- 
rious indeed, when compared wi^h the dens in which 
he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures 
were derived from what the astronomer of his Abys- 
sinian tale called "the endearing elegance of female 
friendship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, 
coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by 
her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his 
reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he 
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most 
tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could pur- 
chase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to 
work by womanly compassion, could devise, was 
wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kind- 
ness by an affection pure as the affection of a father, 
yet delicately tinged with a gallantry which, though 
awkward, must have been more flattering than the 
attentions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in 
the names, now obsolete, of buck and maccaroni.^ It 

^ A district on the south side of the Thames. 

2 About six miles out from what was then the town. 

^ Dandy or fop. Cf. " Yankee Doodle." Mac(c)aroni was 
ihe name given to a club of fast young men who had been abroad 
and had brought back a taste for foreign dress and manners. 



50 MACAULAY. 

should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during 
about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the 
Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to 
Bath,^ and sometimes to Brighton, ^ once to Wales, 
and once to Paris. ^ But he had at the same time a 
house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the 
north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, 
a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling 
to pieces, and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor 
he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with 
a plain dinner, — a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and 
spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling 
uninhabited during his long absences. It was the 
home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates 
that ever was brought together. At the head of the 
establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named 
Williams, whose chief recommendations were her 
blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her mur- 
murs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another 
lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins, 
whose family he had known many years before in 
Staifordshire. Room was found for the daughter of 
Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, 
who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but 
whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack 
doctor named Levett,* who bled and dosed coal-heav-f 

^ The leading watering-place of the eighteenth century. 

2 A famous seaside resort. 

8 In 1775. 

* For this old quack, who died Jan. 17, 1782, Johnson wrote 
an elegy entitled On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser 
in Physic, that for genuine sentiment and admirable style de- 
serves a high place in its class of compositions, and suggests a 
regret that its author did not oftener try his hand on similar 
subjects. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 61 

ers and hackney - coaclimen, and received for fees 
crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and 
sometimes a little copper, completed this strange 
menagerie. All these poor creatures were at constant 
war with each other and with Johnson's negro servant 
Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their 
hostilities from the servant to the master, complained 
that a better table was not kept for them, and railed 
or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make 
his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern.^ 
And yet he who was generally the haughtiest and 
most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt 
to resent anything which looked like a slight on the 
part of a purse-^^roud bookseller, or of a noble and 
powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, 
who but for his bounty must have gone to the work- 
house, insults more provoking than those for which 
he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance 
to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. Williams and 
Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, continued to tor- 
ment him and to live upon him. 

The course of life which has been described was 
interrupted in Johnson's sixty -fourth year by an im- 
portant event. He had early read an account of the 
Hebrides , and had been much interested by learning 
that there was so near him a land peopled by a race 
which was still as rude and simple as in the Middle 
Ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with 
a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had 
ever seen, frequently crossed his mind. But it is not 
probable that his curiosity would have overcome his 
habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the 
mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell im- 

1 Id Fleet Street, 



52 MACAULAY. 

portuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered 
to be his squire. At length, in August, 1773, John- 
son crossed the Highland line, and plunged coura- 
geously into what was then considered, by most Eng- 
lishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After 
wandering about two months through the Celtic re- 
gion, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect 
him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy 
ponies which could hardly bear his weight, he re- 
turned to his old haunts with a mind full of new 
images and new theories. During the following year 
he employed him^self in recording his adventures. 
About the beginning of 1775, his "Journey to the 
Hebrides " was published, and was, during some 
weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles 
in which any attention was paid to literat;ure.^ The 
book is still read with pleasure. The narrative is 
entertaining; the speculations, whether sound or un- 
sound, are always ingenious; and the style, though 
too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more 
graceful than that of his early writings. His preju- 
dice against the Scotch had at length become little 
more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of 
the old feeling had been effectually removed by the 
kind and respectful hospitality with which he had 
been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of 
course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory 
should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or 
that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks 
of England should not be struck by the bareness of 
Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in cen- 
sure Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most 
enlightened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield ^ at their 

1 William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (1705-1793), one of the 
^,Teatest of British jurists. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 53 

head, were well pleased. But some foolish and igno- 
rant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little un- 
palatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, 
and assailed him, whom they chose to consider as the 
enemy of their country, with libels much more dis' 
honorable to their country than anything that he had 
ever said or written. They published paragraphs in 
the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny 
pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused 
Johnson for being blear-eyed; another, for being a 
pensioner; a third informed the world that one of the 
doctor's uncles had been convicted of felony in Scot- 
land, and had found that there was in that country 
one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Eng- 
lishman. Macpherson,^ whose "Fingal" had been 
proved in the "Journey "^ to be an impudent for- 
gery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The 
only effect of this threat was, that Johnson reiterated 
the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, 
and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, 
which, if the impostor had not been too wise to en- 
counter it, would assuredly have descended upon him, 
to borrow tjie sublime language of his own epic poem, 
"like a hammer on the red son of the furnace." 

^ The details of the Ossian controversy started hy James 
Macpherson's (1738-1796) epic Fingal (1762), which purported 
to be a translation from the Gaelic bard of the third century, 
A. D., cannot be given here. It is generally held that Macpherson 
drew mainly upon his own imagination, for he never produced 
documentary evidence for his claims. His poems were, however, 
immensely popular for a while both in England and on the Con- 
tinent. Thomas Jefferson admired him greatly. 

2 In the division entitled " Ostig in Sky.'* All mention of .^N^^ 
Macpherson by name is carefully avoided, which doubtless ^^ 
made him more angry. 



54 MA CAUL AY. 

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice what- 
ever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into 
controversy ; and he adhered to his resolution with a 
steadfastness which is the more extraordinary because 
he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff 
of which controversialists are made. In conversa- 
tion he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertina- 
cious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, 
he had recourse to sophistry; and when heated by 
altercation, he made unsparing use of sarcasm and 
invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, 
his whole character seemed to be changed. A hun- 
dred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him ; 
but not one of the hundred could boast of having 
been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even 
of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, 
and Hendersons ^ did their best to annoy him, in the 
hope that he would give them importance by answer- 
ing them. But the reader will in vain search his 
works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to 
MacNicol or Henderson. One Scotchman, bent on 
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him 
to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter : — 

"Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." ^ 
But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He 
had learned, both from his own observation and from 
literary history, in which he was deeply read, that 
the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, 
not by what is written about them, but by what is 
written in them ; and that an author whose works are 
likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle 

1 See Hill's or Napier's edition of Boswell for these obscure 
men. 

2 " I desire very much to contend with you if you are willing." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. bb 

with detractors whose works are certain to die. \ He 
always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock, which 
could be kept up only by being beaten back as well 
as b'eaten forward, and which would soon fall if there 
were only one battledore. \ No saying was oftener in 
his mouth than that fine- apothegm of Bentley,^ that 
no man was ever written down but by himself. 

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of 
the "Journey to the Hebrides," Johnson did what 
none of his envious assailants could have done, and 
to a certain extent succeeded in writing himself 
down. The disputes between England and her Amer- 
ican colonies had reached a point at which no ami- 
cable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evi- 
dently impending; and the ministers seem to have 
thought that the eloquence of Johnson might with 
advantage be employed to inflame the nation against 
the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond 
the Atlantic. He had already written two or three 
tracts in defence of the foreign and domestic policy 
of the government; and those tracts, though hardly 
worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of 
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and 
Stockdale,^ But his "Taxation no Tyranny "^ was 
a pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, 

^ Richard Bentley (1662-1742), in some respects the greatest 
classical scholar England has produced. He has gained a place 
in English literature by his masterly Dissertation^ in which he 
showed that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris were spurious, 
and won a complete victory over such men as Atterbury, Swift, 
and Temple. See Swift's Battle of the Books, Macaulay's essay 
on Atterbury, and the Dissertation itself. 

^ Well-known booksellers of the period. 

2 Appeared in 1775, and was a defense of the government 
policy toward the American colonies. 



66 MAC A UL AY. 

which can have been recommended to his choice by 
nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought to 
have despised. The arguments were such as boys 
use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as 
awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even 
Boswell was forced to own that in this unfortunate 
piece he could detect no trace of his master's powers. 
The general opinion was, that the strong faculties 
which had produced the Dictionary and "The Ram- 
bler " were beginning to feel the effect of time and of 
disease, and that the old man would best consult his 
credit by writing no more. 
^'^But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, 
not because his mind was less vigorous than when he 
wrote "Easselas" in the evenings of a week, but be- 
cause he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to 
choose for him, a subject such as he would at no time 
have been competent to treat. He was in no sense 
a statesman. He never willingly read, or thought, 
or talked about, affairs of state. He loved biogra- 
phy, literary history, the history of manners; but 
political history was positively distasteful to him. 
The question at issue between the colonies and the 
mother country was a question about which he had 
really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the 
greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that 
for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed 
if Burke had tried to write comedies like those of 
Sheridan;^ as Reynolds would have failed if Rey- 
nolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of 

1 Richard Briiisley (Butler) Sheridan (1751-1816) in his 
Rivals and School for Scandal was, with the possible exception of 
Goldsmith, the best writer of comedies since Congreve's time. 
He was also a noted orator. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 67 

Wilson.^ Happily, Johnson soon had an opportu- 
nity of proving most signally that his failure was not 
to be ascribed to intellectual decay. 
uA'^Oti Easter Eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a 
meeting which consisted of forty of the first book- 
sellers in London, called upon him. Though he had 
some scruples about doing business at that season, he 
received his visitors with much civility. They came 
to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, 
from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and 
to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. 
He readily undertook the task, a task for which he 
was preeminently qualified. His knowledge of the 
literary history of England since the Restoration was 
unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived partly 
from books, and partly from sources which had long 
been closed, — from old Grub Street traditions; from 
the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers 
who had long been lying in parish vaults ; from the 
recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who 
had conversed with the wits of Button; ^ Gibber,^ who 
had mutilated the plays of two generations of drama- 
tists ; Orrery,^ who had been admitted to the society 

1 Richard Wilson (1714-1782). 

2 Button's coffee-house, near Covent Garden, was frequented 
by Addison and his friends. Its proprietor had been butler to 
Lady Warwick. 

^ Colley Gibber (1671-1757) was an actor and a dramatist of 
Versatility who, absurdly enough, was made poet laureate. He 
was satirized in the Dunciad and felt Dr. Johnson's wrath. He 
is now remembered chiefly for his Autobiography and for the 
line, " Richard is himself again," which he introduced into his 
version of Richard III. 

* John Boyle (1707-1662), fifth earl of Orrery, who wrote a 
biography of Swift. 



58 MACAULAY. 

of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of 
no very honorable kind to Pope.^ The biogra])her, 
therefore, sat down to his task with a mind fLll of 
matter. He had at first intended to give only a 
paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five 
pages to the greatest name. But the flood of anec 
dote and criticism overflowed the narrow channel. 
The work, which was originally meant to consist only 
of a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes, — small 
volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. The 
first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 
1781,2 

^''-The "Lives of the Poets" are, on the whole, the 
best of Jolmson's works. ' The narratives are as en- 
tertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on 
human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. 
The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when 
grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be 
studied ; for, however erroneous they may be, they are 
never silly. They are the judgments of a mind tram- 
meled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but 
vigorous and acute. They therefore generally con- 
tain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be 
separated from the alloy, and at the very worst they 
mean something, — a praise to which much of what 
is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. 

Savage's "Life" Johnson reprinted nearly as it 
had appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that 
life, will turn to the other lives, will be struck by the 
difference of » style. Since Johnson had been at ease 
in his circumstances, he had written little and had 

^ Helped him on the Dunciad, See Johnson's Life of Savage^ 
2 Matthew Arnold edited the more important LiveSy and Miv 
Arthur Waugh has since edited the complete work. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 59 

talked mucli. When, therefore, he, after the lapse 
of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he 
had contracted while he was in the constant habit of 
elaborate composition was less perceptible than for- 
merly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial 
ease which it had formerly wanted. The improve- 
ment may be discerned by a skilful critic in the 
"Journey to the Hebrides," and in the "Lives of the 
Poets" is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice 
of the most careless reader, 
, Among the lives the best are, perhaps, those of 
Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, be- 
yond all doubt, that of Gray.^ 
4j V This great work at once became popular. There 
was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure; 
but even those who were loudest in blame were at- 
tracted by the book in spite of themselves. Malone ^ 
computed the gains of the publishers at five or six 
thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly 
remunerated. Intending at first to write very short 
prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred 
guineas. The booksellers, when they saw how far 
his performance had surpassed his promise, added 
only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he 
did not despise, or affect to despise, money, and 
though his strong sense and long experience ought to 
have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems 

^ Arnold selected the Lives of Milton, Addison, Swift, Dry- 
den, Pope and Gray, but he was influenced by the place they 
occupy in literature. Johnson was not well fitted to appreciate 
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), but this fact hardly accounts for the 
deficiencies of his account of that great scholar and poet. 

2 Edmund Malone (1741-1812), chiefly noted for his labors 
AS an editor of Shakespeare. He also edited Boswell. 



60 MAC A UL AY. 

to have been singularly unskillful and unlucky in his 
literary bargains. He was generally reputed the first 
English writer of his time, yet several writers of his 
time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never 
ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robert- 
son ^ received four thousand five hundred pounds for 
the "History of Charles V. ; " and it is no disrespect 
to the memory of Robertson to say that the "History 
of Charles V." is both a less valuable and a less 
amusing book than the "Lives of the Poets." 
^^ Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The 
infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That 
inevitable event of which he never thought without 
horror was brought near to him, and his whole life 
was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often 
to pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year he 
lost what could never be replaced. The strange de- 
pendents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, 
in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by 
habit, dropped off one by one ; and in the silence of 
his home he regretted even the noise of their scolding- 
matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no 
more, and it would have been well if his wife had 
been laid beside him. But she survived to be the 
laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to 
draw, from the eyes of the old man who had loved 
her beyond anything in the world, tears far more 
bitter than he would have shed over her grave. 
With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, 
she was not made to be independent. The control of 

1 Dr. William Robertson (1721-1793), one of Johnson's few 
Scotch friends. The history of the great Emperor and that 
relating to America are still standard books, but are probably 
little read. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 61 

a mind more steadfast than her own was necessary to 
her respectability. While she was restrained by her 
husband, — a man of sense and firmness, indulgent 
to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed 
master of his house, — her worst offences had been 
impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettish- 
ness ending in sunny good-humor. But he was gone ; 
and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with 
strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judg- 
ment. She soon fell in love with a music-master 
from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could dis- 
cover anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps 
some better feelings, struggled hard against this 
degrading passion; but the struggle irritated her 
nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered 
her health. Conscious that her choice was one which 
Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to 
escape from his inspection. Her manner towards 
him changed. She was sometimes cold and some- 
times petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he 
left Streatham ; she never pressed him to return ; and 
if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner 
which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome 
guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she 
gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the 
Greek Testament in the library which had been 
formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer, 
he commended the house and its inmates to the Di- 
vine protection, and, with emotions which choked his 
voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever 
that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house 
behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days 
which still remained to him were to run out. Here, 
m June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which. 




62 Wf MACAULAY. 

however, he recovered, and which does not appear to 
have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. But 
other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma 
tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms 
made their appearance. While sinking under a com- 
plication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose 
friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen 
years of his life had married an Italian fiddler, that 
all London was crying shame upon her, and that the 
newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions 
to the Ephesian matron^ and the two pictures in 
"Hamlet. "2 He vehemently said that he would try 
to forget her existence. He never uttered her name. 
Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung 
into the fire. She, meanwhile, fled from the laughter 
and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a 
land where she was unknown, hastened across Mont 
Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas 
of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the 
great man with whose name hers is inseparably asso- 
ciated had ceased to exist. ^ 

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily 
affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling de- 
scribed in that fine but gloomy paper ^ which closes 
the series of his "Idlers" seemed to grow stronger in 

1 See Petronius Arbiter, chap. xiii. (Bohn). The matron went 
down to die in the tomb where her husband was lying dead, and 
fell in love with a guard stationed near by. The story is found 
in various forms. 

2 Act III. scene iv. 

^ Macaulay seems to have done injustice to Mrs. Piozzi and 
her husband. Johnson's letter, to the widow, of July 8, 1784, 
should be read in connection with this passage. It is one of the 
most pathetic in literature. 

- The paper mentioned is an admirable specimen of Johnson's 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 63 

him as his last hour drew near. He fancied that he 
should be able to draw his breath more easily in a 
southern climate, and would probably have set out 
for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense 
of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the 
means of defraying; for he had laid up about two 
thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had made 
the fortune of several publishers. But he was un- 
willing to break in upon this hoard, and he seems 
to have wished even to keep its existence a secret. 
Some of his friends hoped that the government might 
be induced to increase his pension to six hundred 
pounds a year; but this hope was disappointed, and 
he resolved to stand one English winter more. That 
winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his 
breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, 
in spite of incisions which he — courageous against 
pain, but timid against death — urged his surgeons to 
make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care 
which had mitigated his sufferings during months 
of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not 
left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons 
attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. 
Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Wind- 
ham^ sat much in the sick-room, arranged the pil- 
lows, and sent his own servant to watch at night by 
the bed. Frances Burney,^ whom the old man had 

power of moralizing in a sincere and moving way. It should 
be read by all who are interested in the Doctor, whether as a 
writer or as a man. 

^ William Windham (1750-1810), a noted parliamentary 
orator. 

2 1752-1840, afterwards Madame d'Arblay. (See Macaulay's 
essay on her.) Her novel Evelina is a classic worthy of Macau- 
lay's well-known praise. 



64 MA CAUL AY. 

cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at 
the door ; while Langton, whose piety eminently qual- 
ified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a 
time, received the last pressure of his friend's hand 
within. When at length the moment, dreaded 
through so many years, came close, the dark cloud 
passed away from Johnson's mind. His temper be- 
came unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to 
think with terror of death and of that which lies be- 
yond death ; and he spoke much of the mercy of God 
and of the propitiation of Christ. In this serene 
frame of mind he died, on the 13th of December, 
1784. He was laid a week later in Westminster 
Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had 
been the historian, — Cowley and Denham, Dryden 
and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison.^ 
I Since his death, the popularity of his works — • 
the "Lives of the Poets" and perhaps "The Vanity 
of Human Wishes" excepted— has greatly dimin- 
ished. His Dictionary has been altered by editors 
till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion to 
his "Eambler" or his "Idler" is not readily appre- 
hended in literary circles. The fame even of "Eas- 
selas" has grown somewhat dim. But, though the 
celebrity of the writings may have declined, the celeb- 
rity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. 
Boswell's book has done for him more than the best 

1 For these great inhabitants of '' Poets' Corner " the text and 
notes have already given sufficient explanation, save, perhaps, in 
the case of William Congreve (1670-1729), the brilliant drama- 
tist, whose comedies are in some respects unrivaled, and of 
Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who as a writer of society verse is 
Btill uneclipsed, though Praed and Austin Dobson have followed 
him. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 65 

of his own books could do. (The memory of other 
authors is kept alive by their works, but the memory 
of Johnson keeps many of his works alive, j The old 
philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with 
the metal buttons, and the shirt which ought to be at 
wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming 
with his fingers, tearing his nieat like a tiger, and 
swallowing his tea in oceans.) [^o human being who 
Tias been more than seventy years in the grave is so 
well known to us.\ And it is but just to say that our 
intimate acquaimance with what he would himself 
have called the anf ractuosities ^ of his intellect and of 
his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction 
that he was both a great and a good man.^ ) 

^ That is, the windings and turnings. 

2 The style of this concluding paragraph may well be com- 
pared with that of the conclusion of the essay on Milton. It is 
much quieter and is free from many of the defects of the more 
youthful work, yet somewhat lacks the elan of the latter. Indeed, 
the whole essay shows a chastened Macaulay and so has won 
high praise from the fastidious critic, whom the panegyric on 
Milton sometimes displeased, Mr. Matthew Arnold. In its 
evolution, too, the essay is perfectly simple and straightforward, 
so that an analysis by paragraphs would be an easy task for the 
youngest student. This very freedom from complexity accounts 
in part for the popularity of the composition. 




OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The short sketch of Goldsmith was contributed to the Eficy" 
clopcedia Britannica in 1856, and is still included in the latest 
edition. Like the essay on Johnson it represents Macaulay at his 
best. There is little of the partisanship, the exaggeration, the 
misleading but fascinating rhetoric to be found in many of the 
earlier essays ; but there is the same fullness of knowledge, 
the same facility of allusion and reference, the same clarity 
and straightforwardness of style. As in the Johnson there is 
a sympathy with the subject of his sketch (who could fail to 
sympathize with Goldsmith !) which Macaulay did not always 
have, hence the reader puts the essay down with a feeling of 
attraction toward both the wayward genius and his exemplary 
critic. There can be no better test of good criticism than this. 

As for Goldsmith, it is too late in the day to undertake his 
praise. He shares with Charles Lamb the distinction of deserv- 
ing an epithet which the French threw away upon one of their 
most worthless kings, — the Well Beloved. Everybody reads 
The Vicar of Wakefield and The Deserted Village^ and every- 
body loves their author. A distinguished American economist 
once told the present writer that he never began to compose a 
new book without first reading here and there in Goldsmith, in 
order that he might, if possible, catch something of the secret 
of that artless style which has captivated generations of readers. 
The student can do no better than to follow this excellent exam- 
ple; at any rate he should not fail to make himself experience 
the charm of Goldsmith's style, whether he imitate it or not. 
This he can easily do, for the complete works — that is, the 
miscellaneous works, which are all one needs — are accessible 
in the Globe edition, to which Professor Masson has prefixed 



68 MA CAUL AY. 

an ex<jellent introduction. The standard biographies are men- 
tioned by Macaulay, and to these may be added those by the 
novelist William Black (in the English Men of Letters) and by 
the poet Austin Dobson (in the GrecU Writers, with a biblio- 
graphy). 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 



Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most pleasing 
English writers of the eighteenth century. He was 
of a Protestant and Saxon family which had been 
long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most 
other Protestant and Saxon families, been in troubled 
times harassed and put in fear by the native popu- 
lation. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied, in 
the reign of Queen Anne, at the diocesan school of 
Elphin,^ became attached to the daughter of the 
schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled 
at a place called Pallas, in the county of Longford. 
There he with difficulty supported his wife and chil- 
dren on what he could earn, partly as a curate and 
partly as a farmer. 

At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in Novem- 
ber, 1728.^ That spot was then, for all practical pur- 
poses, almost as remote from the busy and splendid 
capital in which his later years were passed, as any 
clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Aus- 
tralasia now is. Even at this day, those enthusiasts 
who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace 
of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of 
their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any 

^ In Roscommon County. For the history of Ireland at this 
juncture, consult Lecky and Froude. 
2 November 10th«. 



70 MA CAUL AY. 

high-road, on a dreary plain, which in wet weather 
is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunt- 
ing car^ to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs 
through which the most strongly built wheels cannot 
be dragged. 

When Oliver was still a child, his father was pre- 
sented to a living, worth about two hundred pounds 
a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family 
accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness 
for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the 
village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his let- 
ters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh 
year to a village school kept by an old quartermas- 
ter 2 on half -pay, who professed to teach nothing but 
reading, writing, and arithmetic, but who had an in- 
exhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees,^ 
and fairies, — about the great Eapparee ^ chiefs, Bal- 
dearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the 
exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope,^ the surprise 
of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. 
This man must have been of the Protestant religion ; 

^ A typically Irish vehicle. 

2 " Paddy " Byrne. 

^ A female fairy, believed to be attached to a particular 
house, and to foretell at each appearance the death of an in- 
mate. 

^ The word means a noisy fellow, — then a vagrant or robber. 
It refers specifically to wild native Irishmen, who for many 
years committed agrarian outrages. Hugh Baldearg O'Don- 
nell, one of the most noted of these freebooters, died in 1704. 

5 Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough (1658?-1735), and 
James, Lord Stanhope (1673-1721), were both generals who 
won great reputation in Spain during the War of the Spanish 
Succession, especially in the battles mentioned. Peterborough 
had a very romantic career, and Stanhope was afterwards as 
important statesman. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 71 

but he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke 
the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremedi- 
tated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through 
life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish 
music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan,^ 
some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It 
ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one 
of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous 
ties with the Established Church, never showed the 
least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, 
in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too gener- 
ally regarded the subject majority. So far, indeed, 
was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of 
the caste to which he belonged, that he conceived an 
aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, ^ and, 
even when George the Third was on the throne, main- 
tained that nothing but the restoration of the banished 
dynasty could save the country. 

From the humble academy kept by the old sol- 
dier Goldsmith was removed in his ninth year. He 
went to several grammar schools, and acquired some 
knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this 
time seems to have been far from happy. He had, 
as appears from the admirable portrait of him at 
Knowle,^ features harsh even to ugliness. The 
small-pox ^ had set its mark on him with more than 
usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs 
ill put together. Among boys, little tenderness is 

1 Turlogh Carolan (1670-1738), the most famous of the mod- 
ern Irish bards. 

2 The formula used in the Whig toast to William III. 

^ Better spelt Knole, the seat of Lord Sackville in Kent, one 
of the finest baronial halls in England. The portrait mentioned 
18 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

^ This disease was very common at the time. 



72 MACAULAY. 

shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited 
by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a 
peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which 
he retained to the last. He became the common butt 
of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the 
playground, and flogged as a dunce in the school- 
room. When he had risen to eminence, those who 
once derided him ransacked their memory for the 
events of his early years, and recited repartees and 
couplets which had dropped from him, and which, 
though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a 
quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers 
which produced "The Vicar of Wakefield " and "The 
Deserted Village." 

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity 
College, Dublin, as a sizar. ^ The sizars paid nothing 
for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but 
xhey had to perform some menial services from which 
they have long been relieved. They swept the court; 
they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and 
changed the plates and poured out the ale of the 
rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not 
alone, in a garret, on the window of which his name, 
iBcrawled by himself, is still read with interest. From 
t5uch garrets many men of less parts than his have 
made their way to the wool-sack or to the episcopal 
bench. 2 But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the 
humiliations, threw away all the advantages of his 
(Bituation. He neglected the studies of the place, 
stood low at the examinations, was turned down to 

^ A term applied to certain undergraduates at Cambridge and 
Trinity College, Dublin, sufficiently described in the text. 

* That is, have become Lord Chancellors or Bishops sitting 
in the House of Peers. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 73 

the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the 
lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping 
on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor ^ for 
giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some 
gay youths and damsels from the city. 

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided 
between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his 
father died,^ leaving a mere pittance. The youth 
obtained his bachelor's degree and left the univer- 
sity. During some time, the humble dwelling to 
which his widowed mother had retired was his home. 
He was now in his twenty -first year; it was neces- 
sary that he should do something, and his education 
seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress 
himself in gaudy colors, of which he was as fond as 
a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, 
to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost 
stories by the fire in winter. He tried five or six 
professions in turn without success. He applied for 
ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he 
was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace.^ He 
then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon 
quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute 
about play. Then he determined to emigrate to 
America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw 
him set out for Cork on a good horse, with thirty 
pounds in his pocket. But in six weeks he came 
back on a miserable hack without a penny, and in- 
formed his mother that the ship in which he had 
taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he 
was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him.^ 

1 His name was Wilder. 2 in 1747. 3 Qf Elphin. 

* Compare with the adventures of Moses in The Vicar of 
Wakefield, 



74 MACAULAY, 

Then he resolved to study the law. A generous kins- 
man 1 advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Gold* 
smith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming- 
house, and lost every shilling. He then thought of 
medicine. A small purse was made up, and in his 
twenty -fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. ^ At 
Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal 
attendance on lectures, and picked up some superfi- 
cial information about chemistry and natural history. 
Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study 
physic. He left that celebrated university — the third 
university at which he had resided — in his twenty- 
seventh year, without a degree, with the merest smat- 
tering of medical knowledge, and with no property 
but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however, 
proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through 
Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes 
which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and 
which often procured for him a supper and a bed. 
He wandered as far as Italy. His musical perform- 
ances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians, 
but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained 
at the gates of convents. It should, however, be 
observed, that the stories which he told about this 
part of his life ought to be received with great cau- 
tion, for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; 
and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration 
is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when 
he talks about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, 
was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that 
he was present at a most interesting conversation be- 

1 His uncle by marriage, Rev. Thomas Contarine. 

2 The university of that city, noted for its school of medical 
science. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 75 

tween Voltaire and Fontenelle,^ and that this conver- 
sation took place at Paris. Now it is certain that 
Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris 
during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the 
Continent. 

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a 
shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. He 
had, indeed, if his own unsupported evidence may be 
trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a 
doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly use- 
less to him. In England his flute was not in request ; 
there were no convents; and he was forced to have 
recourse to a series of desperate expedients. He 
turned strolling player, but his face and figure were 
ill suited to the boards even of the humblest thea- 
tre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with 
phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of 
beggars which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was 
for a time usher ^ of a school, and felt the miseries 
and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he 
thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn his 
bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the 
new yoke more galling than the old one, and was 
glad to become an usher again. He obtained a 
medical appointment in the service of the East India 
Company, but the appointment was speedily revoked. 
Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject 
was one on which he never liked to talk. It is prob- 
able that he was incompetent to perform the duties of 
the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeons' 

^ Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), a noted 
French writer. 
'^ That is, assistant master. 



76 MA CAUL AY. 

Hall^ for examination as mate to a naval hospital. 
Even to so humble a post he was found unequal. By 
this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for 
a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no 
more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest 
drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in 
a miserable court, to which he had to climb from 
the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flag- 
stones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the 
ascent have long disappeared, ^ but old Londoners 
well remember both. Here, at thirty, the unlucky 
adventurer sat down to toil like a galley-slave. 

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press 
some things which have survived, and many which 
have perished. He produced articles for reviews,^ 
magazines, and newspapers; children's books, which, 
bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous wood- 
cuts, appeared in the window of the once far-famed 
shop at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard;^ "An 
Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe," 
which, though of little or no value, is still reprinted 
among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash," which is 
not reprinted,^ though it well deserves to be so; a 
superficial and incorrect but very readable "History 
of England," in a series of letters purporting to be 

^ That is, the buildings of the Royal College of Surgeons, 
which trains and examines candidates for the medical profes- 
sion. 

2 The accuracy of this statement has been questioned. 

2 Mainly for The Monthly Review, started in 1749 by the book- 
Beller Griffiths. 

^ It was kept by John Newbery. 

^ Richard Nash (1674-1761) was a celebrated leader of fash- 
ion, a predecessor of " Beau " Brummel. The work has been 
reprinted. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 77 

addressed by a nobleman to his son ; and some very 
lively and amusing' "Sketches of London Society,'* 
in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a 
Chinese traveler to his friends.^ All these works were 
anonymous, but some of them were well known to be 
Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation 
of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, 
indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For accurate 
research or grave disquisition he was not well quali- 
fied by nature or by education. He knew nothing* 
accurately : his reading had been desultory, nor had • 
he meditated deeply on what he had read. He had 
seen much of the world; but he had noticed and 
retained little more of what he had seen than some 
grotesque incidents and characters which happened 
to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very 
scantily stored with materials, he used what materials 
he had in such a way as to produce a wonderful effect. ' 
There have been many greater writers, but perhaps 
no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable. His 
style was always pure and easy, and, on proper occa- 
sions, pointed and energetic. His narratives were 
always amusing; his descriptions always picturesque; 
his humor rich and joyous, yet not without an occa- 
sional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything 
that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain 
natural grace and decorum hardly to be expected 
from a man a great part of whose life had been passed 
among thieves and beggars, street-walkers and merry- 
andrews, in those squalid dens which are the reproach 
of great capitals. 

^ In imitation of Montesquieu's celebrated Persian Letters. 
Goldsmith's letters appeared in The Public Ledger for 1760, and 
afterwards formed his well-known Citizen of the Worldo 



78 MA CAUL AY. 

As his name gradually became known, the circle 
of his acquaintance widened. He was introduced to 
Johnson, who was then considered as the first of liv- 
ing English writers; to Reynolds, the first of Eng- 
lish painters ; and to Burke, who had not yet entered 
Parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by 
his writings and by the eloquence of his conversation. 
With these eminent men Goldsmith became intimate. 
In 1763 he was one of the nine original members of 
' that celebrated fraternity which has sometimes been 
called the Literary Club, but which has always dis- 
claimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple 
name of "The Club. "i 

By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable 
dwelling at the top of Breakneck Steps, and had 
taken chambers in the more civilized region of the 
Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to 
pitiable shifts. Towards the close of 1764 his rent 
was so long in arrear that his landlady one morning 
called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The debtor, in 
great perplexity, dispatched a messenger to Johnson ; 
and Johnson, always friendly though often surly, 
sent back the messenger with a guinea, and promised 
to follow speedily. He came, and found that Gold- 
smith had changed the guinea, and was railing at the 
landlady over a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the 
cork into the bottle, and entreated his friend to con- 
sider calmly how money was to be procured. Gold- 
smith said that he had a novel ready for the press. 
Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that there 
were good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it 
for sixty pounds, and soon returned with the money. 
The rent was paid, and the sheriff's officer withdrew. 

^ See the essay on Johnson, page 44, note 2, and page 45, note L 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 79 

According to one story, Goldsmith gave his landlady 
a sharp reprimand for her treatment of him ; accord- 
ing to another, he insisted on her joining him in a 
bowl of punch. Both stories are probably true. The 
novel which was thus ushered into the world was 
"The Vicar of Wakefield." 

But before "The Vicar of Wakefield" appeared 
in print, came the great crisis of Goldsmith's liter- 
ary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he published a 
poem entitled "The Traveller." It was the first work 
to which he had put his name, and it at once raised 
him to the rank of a legitimate English classic. The 
opinion of the most skilful critics was, that nothing 
finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book of 
"The Dunciad."^ In one respect, "The Traveller" 
differs from all Goldsmith's other writings. In gen- 
eral his designs were bad and his execution good. 
In "The Traveller" the execution, though deserving 
of much praise, is far inferior to the design. No 
philosophical poem, ancient or modern, has a plan so 
noble, and at the same time so simple. An English 
wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the 
point where three great countries meet, looks down 
on the boundless prospect, reviews his long pilgrim- 
age, recalls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of 
government, of religion, of national character, which 
he has observed, and comes to the conclusion, just or 
unjust, that our happiness depends little on political 
institutions, and much on the temper and regulation 
of our minds. 

While the fourth edition of "The Traveller " was on 
the counters of the booksellers, " The Vicar of Wake- 
field" appeared, and rapidly obtained a popularity 

^ Published in March, 1742, three years before Pope's death. 



80 MACAULAY. 

wliich has lasted down to our own time, and whicli is 
likely to last as long as our language. The fable is, 
indeed, one of the worst that ever was constructed. 
It wants not merely that probability which ought to 
be found in a tale of common English life, but that 
consistency which ought to be found even in the wild- 
est fiction about witches, giants, and fairies. But 
the earlier chapters have all the sweetness of pasto- 
ral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. 
Moses and his spectacles, the Vicar and his mono- 
gamy, the Sharper and his cosmogony, the Squire 
proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, 
Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of con- 
verting a rakish lover by studying the controversy 
between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies 
v/ith their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and 
Dr. Burdock's verses, and Mr. Burchell with his 
"Fudge!" have caused as much harmless mirth as 
has ever been caused by matter packed into so small 
a number of pages. The latter part of the tale is 
unworthy of the beginning. As we approach the 
catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and thicker, 
and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer. ^ 
The success which had attended Goldsmith as a 
novelist emboldened him to try his fortune as a dra- 
matist. He wrote "The Good-natured Man," a piece 
which had a worse fate than it deserved. Garrick 
refused to produce it at Drury Lane. It was acted 
at Covent Garden in 1768, but was coldly received. 
The author, however, cleared by his benefit nights, 
and by the sale of the copyright, not less than five 

^ The classic account of the sale of the Vicar given above 
must be taken with many allowances. See Dobson's Gold- 
smith. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 81 

hundred pounds, — five times as much as he had made 
by "The Traveller" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" 
together. The plot of "The Good-natured Man" is, 
like almost all Goldsmith's plots, very ill-constructed. 
But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous, — much 
more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the 
town at that time. A canting, mawkish play, entitled 
"False Delicacy,"^ had just had an immense run. 
Sentimentality was all the mode. During some years, 
more tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies ; 
and a pleasantry which moved the audience to any^ 
thing more than a grave smile was reprobated as low. 
It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene 
in "The Good-natured Man " — that in which Miss 
Eichland finds her lover attended by the bailiff and 
the bailiff's follower in full court-dresses — should have 
been mercilessly hissed, and should have been ^^mitted 
after the first night. 

In 1770 appeared "The Deserted Village." In 
mere diction and versification, this celebrated poem 
is fully equal, perhaps superior, to "The Traveller;" 
and it is generally preferred to "The Traveller" by 
that large class of readers who think, with Bayes in 
"The Rehearsal, "2 that the only use of a plan is to 
bring in fine things. More discerning judges, how- 
ever, while they admire the beauty of the details, are 
shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades 
the whole. The fault which we mean is not that 



1 By Hugh Kelly (1739-1777), a small author with whon^ 
Goldsmith's relations were not pleasant. 

2 A satiric play brought out in 1672 by George Villiers, Duke 
of Buckingham (1627-1788) . It was chiefly an attack on Dry den, 
whom the hero, Bayes, was supposed to personate. It is oftei> 
referred to but not much read at present. 



82 MA CAUL AY. 

theory about wealth and luxury which has so often 
been censured by political economists.^ The theory 
is indeed false; but the poem, considered merely as a 
poem, is not necessarily the worse on that account. 
The finest poem in the Latin language — indeed, the 
finest didactic poem in any language — was written in 
defense of the silliest and meanest of all systems of 
natural and moral philosophy. ^ A poet may easily be 
pardoned for reasoning ill, but he cannot be pardoned 
for describing ill; for observing the world in which 
he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no re- 
semblance to the originals; for exhibiting as copies 
from real life monstrous combinations of things which 
never were, and never could be, found together. 
What would be thought of a painter who should mix 
August and January in one landscape, — who should 
introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene ? Would 
it be a sufficient defense of such a picture to say that 
every part was exquisitely colored; that the green 
hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the wagons 
reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sunburnt 
reapers wiping their foreheads, were very fine; and 
that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine ? 
To such a picture "The Deserted Village" bears a 
great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous 
parts. The village in its happy days is a true Eng- 
lish village. The village in its decay is an Irish vil- 
lage. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith 
has brought close together belong to two different 
countries, and to two different stages in the progress 
of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native 

1 See the concluding paragraphs of the poem. 

2 The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, which is based on the 
philosophy of Epicurus, somewhat caricatured by Macaulay. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 83 

island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty^ 
content, and tranquillity, as his Auburn. He had 
assuredly never seen in England all the inhabitants 
of such a paradise turned out of their homes in one 
day, and forced to emigrate in a body to Americao 
The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent ; the eject- 
ment he had probably seen in Munster; but by join= 
ing the two, he has produced something which never 
was and never will be seen in any part of the world. 

In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Co vent 
Garden with a second play, "She Stoops to Conquer." 
The manager^ was not without great difficulty in- 
duced to bring this piece out. The sentimental com- 
edy still reigned, and Goldsmith's comedies were not 
sentimental. "The Good-natured Man" had been 
too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of "The Good- 
natured Man " was sober when compared with the 
rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in 
truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this 
occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, 
and galleries were in a constant roar of laughter. If 
any bigoted admirer of Kelly and Cumberland ^ ven- 
tured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by 
a general cry of "Turn him out! " or "Throw him 
over!" Two generations have since confirmed the 
verdict which was pronounced on that night. 

While Goldsmith was writing "The Deserted Vil= 

1 George Colman the Elder (1733 ?-1794), himself a dramatist, 
and so harder to please. 

2 Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), a successful but now 
nearly forgotten playwright. The West - Indian is his best 
known work. In his Memoirs he gives an amusing account of 
how he, with some of Goldsmith's other friends, headed by Dr. 
Johnson, went to the theatre prepared to make the play go 
through by their applause. 



84 MA CAUL AY. 

lage " and "She Stoops to Conquer," he was employed 
on works of a very different kind, — works from which 
he derived little reputation, but much profit. He com- 
piled for the use of schools a "History of Rome," 
by which he made three hundred pounds ; a " History 
of England," by which he made six hundred pounds; 
a "History of Greece," for which he received two 
hundred and fifty pounds; a "Natural History," for 
which the booksellers covenanted to pay him eight 
hundred guineas. These works he produced without 
any elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridg- 
ing, and translating into his own clear, pure, and 
flowing language what he found in books well known 
to the world, but too bulky or too dry for boys and 
girls. He committed some strange blunders, for he 
knew nothing with accuracy. Thus, in his "History 
of England," he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; ^ 
nor did he correct this mistake when the book was 
reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed ^ into putting 
into the "History of Greece" an account of a battle 
between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In 
his "Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and 
with perfect gravity, all the most absurd lies which 
he could find in books of travels about gigantic Pata- 
gonians, monkeys that preach sermons, nightingales 
that repeat long conversations. "If he can tell a 
horse from a cow," says Johnson, "that is the extent 
of his knowledge of zoology." How little Goldsmith 
was qualified to write about the physical sciences is 
sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one 
occasion denied that the sun is longer in the northern 
than in the southern signs. It was vain to cite the 

1 It is in Northamptonshire. 



2 



By Gibbon. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 85 

authority of Maupertuis.^ "Maupertuis! " he cried; 
"I understand those matters better than Maupertuis." 
On another occasion he, in defiance of the evidence 
of his own senses, maintained obstinately, and even 
angrily, that he chewed his dinner by moving his 
upper jaw. 

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have 
done more to make the first steps in the laborious 
road to knowledge easy and pleasant. His compila- 
tions are widely distinguished from the compilations 
of ordinary book-makers. He was a great, perhaps 
an unequaled, master of the arts of selection and con- 
densation. In these respects his histories of Rome 
and of England, and still more his own abridgments 
of these histories, well deserve to be studied. In 
general nothing is less attractive than an epitome, 
but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most con- 
cise, are always amusing; and to read them is con- 
sidered by intelligent children, not as a task, but as 
a pleasure. 

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous 
man. He had the means of living in comfort, and 
even in what, to one who had so often slept in barns 
and on bulks, must have been luxury. His fame was 
great, and was constantly rising. He lived in what 
was intellectually far the best society of the kingdom, 
— ^ in a society in which no talent or accomplishment 
was wanting, and in which the art of conversation 
was cultivated with splendid success. There probably 
were never four talkers more admirable in four differ- 
ent ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Gar- 
rick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with 

^ Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a noted 
French mathematician and astronomer. 



86 MA CAUL AY. 

all the four. He aspired to share in their colloquial 
renown, but never was ambition more unfortunate. 
It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so 
much perspicuity, vivacity, and grace should have 
been, whenever he took a part in conversation, an 
empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point 
the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was 
the contrast between Goldsmith's published works 
and the silly things which he said, that Horace Wal- 
pole described him as an inspired idiot. "Noll," 
said Garrick, ''wrote like an angel and talked like 
poor Poll."^ Chamier declared that it was a hard 
exercise of faith to believe that so foolish a chatterer 
could have really written ''The Traveller." Even 
Boswell could say, with contemptuous compassion, 
that he liked very well to hear honest Goldsmith run 
on. "Yes, sir," said Johnson, "but he should not 
like to hear himself." Minds differ as rivers differ. 
There are transparent and sparkling rivers from 
which it is delightful to drink as they flow; to such 
rivers the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson 
may be compared. But there are rivers of which the 
water when first drawn is turbid and noisome, but 
becomes pellucid as crystal and delicious to the taste 
if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited a sedi- 
ment ; and such a river is a type of the mind of Gold- 
smith. His first thoughts on every subject were 
confused even to absurdity, but they required only a 
little time to w6rk themselves clear. When he wrote, 
they had that time, and therefore his readers pro- 
nounced him a man of genius ; but when he talked, 
he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing- 
stock of his hearers. He was painfully sensible of 
^ See page 90, note. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 87 

his inferiority in conversation; he felt every failure 
keenly; yet he had not sufficient judgment and self- 
command to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and 
vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one 
thing which he could not do. After every attempt, 
he felt that he had exposed himself, and writhed with 
shame and vexation ; yet the next moment he began 
again. 

His associates seem to have regarded him with 
kindness, which, in spite of their admiration of his 
writings, was not unmixed with contempt. In truth, 
there was in his character much to love, but very 
little to respect. His heart was soft, even to weak- 
ness; he was so generous that he quite forgot to be 
just; he forgave injuries so readily that he might be 
said to invite them ; and was so liberal to beggars that 
he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. 
He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. 
One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. 
But there is not the least reason to believe that this 
bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince 
and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to 
injure by wicked arts the reputation of any of his 
rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more 
envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbors. 
His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies 
which are but too common among men of letters, 
but which a man of letters who is also a man of the 
world does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with 
he simplicity of a child. When he was envious, in- 
stead of affecting indifference, instead of damning 
with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slyly and 
in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious. 



88 MACAULAY, 



9f 



"Do not, pray do not, talk of Johnson in such terms, 
he said to Bos well; "you harrow up my very soul." 
George Steevens ^ and Cumberland were men far too 
cunning to say such a thing. They would have 
echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and 
then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels 
upon him. Both what was good and what was bad 
in Goldsmith's character was to his associates a per- 
fect security that he would never commit such vil- 
lany. He was neither ill-natured enough, nor long- 
headed enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which 
required contrivance and disguise. 

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a 
man of genius, cruelly treated by the world, and 
doomed to struggle with difficulties which at last broke 
his heart. But no representation can be more remote 
from the truth. He did, indeed, go through much 
sharp misery before he had done anything consider- 
able in literature. But after his name had appeared 
on the title-page of "The Traveller," he had none but 
himself to blame for his distresses. His average in- 
come during the last seven years of his life certainly 
exceeded four hundred pounds a year, and four hun- 
dred pounds a year ranked among the incomes of that 
day at least as high as eight hundred pounds a year 
would rank at present. A single man living in the 
Temple with four hundred pounds a year might then 
be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gen- 
tlemen of good families who were studying the law 
there had so much. But all the wealth which Lord 
Clive ^ had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence 

^ A well-known Shakespearean scholar (1736-1800). 
2 For Robert, Lord Clive (1725-1774), see Macaulay's great 
essay; Sir Lawrence Dundas seems to have been a contractor to 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 89 

Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not 
have sufficed for Goldsmith. He spent twice as 
much as he had. He wore fine clothes, gave dinners 
of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He 
had also, it should be remembered to the honor of his 
heart though not of his head, a guinea, or five, or 
ten, according to the state of his purse, ready for 
any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in 
dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promis- 
cuous charities, that his chief expense lay. He had 
been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the most 
sanguine and the most unskiKul of gamblers. For 
a time he put oflf the day of inevitable ruin by tempo- 
rary expedients. He obtained advances from book- 
sellers by promising to execute works which he never 
began. But at length this source of supply failed. 
He owed more than two thousand pounds, and he 
saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. 
His spirits and health gave way. He was attacked 
by a nervous fever, which he thought himself compe- 
tent to treat. It would' have been happy for him 
if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly 
by himself as by others. Notwithstanding the degree 
which he pretended to have received at Padua, he 
could procure no patients. "I do not practice," he 
once said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for 
my friends." "Pray, dear Doctor," said Beauclerk, 
"alter your rule, and prescribe only for your ene- 
mies." Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent 
advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggra- 
vated the malady. The sick man was induced to call 
in real physicians, and they at one time imagined 

the army in Germany from 1748 to 1759, who amassed great 
wealth and was knighted in 1762, dying in 1781 (?). 



90 MA CAUL AY, 

that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness 
and restlessness continued. He could get no sleep; 
he could take no food. "You are worse," said one 
of his medical attendants, "than you should be from 
the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind 
^ at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last recorded 
words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the 3d of 
April, 1774, in his forty-sixth year. He was laid 
in the churchyard of the Temple ; but the spot was 
not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. 
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. 
Both these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, 
when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst into 
a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved 
by the news that he had flung aside his brush and 
palette for the day. 

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem 
^ appeared, which will, as long as our language lasts, 
associate the names of his two illustrious friends with 
his own. It has already been mentioned that he 
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild, 
blundering talk brought upon him. He was, not 
long before his last illness, provoked into retaliating. ^ 
He wisely betook himself to his pen, and at that 
weapon he proved himseM a match for all his assail- 
ants together. Within a small compass he drew with 
a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the characters 

1 In February, 1774, a party of his friends, dining at the St. 
James coffee-house without him, undertook to write some 
humorous epitaphs on Goldsmith. Garrick contributed the 

couplet ; — 

*' Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, 
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." 

Goldsmith's delightful Retaliation was the outcoipe of the inci« 
dent. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 91 

Df nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though 
this little work did not receive his last touches, it 
must always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is 
impossible, however, not to wish that four or five 
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were 
wanting to that noble gallery, and that their places 
were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon as 
happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Gar- 
rick. 

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honored 
him with a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. NoUe- 
kens^ was tFe sculptor, and Johnson wrote the in- 
scription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson 
did not leave to posterity a more durable and a more 
valuable memorial of his friend. A life of Gold- 
smith would have been an inestimable addition to the 
"Lives of the Poets." No man appreciated Gold- 
smith's writings more justly than Johnson; no man 
was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and 
habits ; and no man was more competent to delineate 
with truth and spirit the peculiarities of a mind in 
which great powers were found in company with great 
weaknesses. But the list of poets to whose works 
Johnson was requested by the booksellers to furnish 
prefaces ended with Lyttelton,^ who died in 1773. 
The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the 
purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would 
have most fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, how- 
ever, has been fortunate in his biographers. Within 
a few years his life has been written by Mr. Prior, ^ 

1 Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). 

2 George, Lord Lyttelton (1709-1773), a better prose writer 
than poet. 

s Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Prior (1790 ?-1869). 



92 MACAULAY. 

by Mr. Washington Irving, and by Mr. Forster.^ 
The diligence of Mr. Prior deserves great praise ; the 
style of Mr. Washington Irving is always pleasing; 
but the highest place must in justice be assigned to 
the eminently interesting work of Mr. Forster. 

1 John Forster (1812-1876), an indefatigable biographer. 
He wrote lives of Landor and Dickens among others. His 
Goldsmith appeared in 1848. 



( 



EXTRACTS FROM JOHNSON, BOSWELL, AND 

PIOZZI. 

The following are quotations from Johnson's Works, Boswell's 
Johnson^ and Madame Piozzi's Anecdotes of Johnson to which 
Macaulay refers, directly or indirectly, upon the pages designated. 

Page 3. 

Of the power of his memory, for which he was all his life 
eminent to a degree almost incredible, the following early 
instance was told me in his presence at Lichfield, in 1776, 
by his step-daughter, Mrs. Lucy Porter, as related to her by 
his mother. When he was a child in petticoats, and had 
learnt to read, Mrs. Johnson one morning put the common 
prayer-book into his hands, pointed to the collect for the 
day, and said, " Sam, you must get this by heart." She went 
upstairs, leaving him to study it : but by the time she had 
reached the second floor, she heard him following her. 
" What 's the matter ? " said she. " I can say it," he re- 
plied ; and repeated it distinctly, though he could not have 
read it more than twice. Boswell. 

Page 8. 

He had another particularity, of which none of his friends 
ever ventured to ask an explanation. It appeared to me 
some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, 
and from which he had never called uj^n his reason to dis- 
entangle him. This was higanaous^car^to go out or in at 
a door or passage, by a certain number oi steps from a cer- 
tain point, or at least so as that either his right or his left 
foot (I am not certain which) should constantly make the 
first actual movement when he came close to the door or 
passage. Thus I conjecture : for I have, upon innumerable 
occasions, observed him suddenly stop, and then seem to 
count his steps with a deep earnestness ; and when he had 
neglected or gone wrong in this sort of magical movement, 
I have seen him go back again, put himself in a proper 
posture to begin the ceremony, and, having gone through 



94 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

it, break from his abstraction, walk briskly on, and join his 
companion. A strange instance of something of this nature, 
even when on horseback, happened when he was in the Isle 
of Skye. Sir Joshua Keynolds had observed him to go a 
good way about, rather than cross a particular alley in Lei- 
cester Fields ; but this Sir Joshua imputed to his having 
had some disagreeable recollection associated with it. 

BOSWELL. 

Page 11. 

I know not for what reason the marriage ceremony was 
not performed at Birmingham ; but a resolution was taken 
that it should be at Derby, for which place the bride and 
bridegroom set out on horseback, I suppose in very good 
humour. But though Mr. Topham Beauclerk used 
archly to mention Johnson's having told him, with much 
gravity, " Sir, it was a love-marriage on both sides," I have 
had from my illustrious friend the following curious account 
of their journey to church upon the nuptial morn (9th 
July) : — " Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got 
into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit 
should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me 
that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me ; 
and when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and com- 
plained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the 
slave of caprice ; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. 
I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her 
sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she 
could not miss it ; and I contrived that she should soon come 
up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears." 
This, it must be allowed, was a singular beginning of con- 
nubial felicity ; but there is no doubt, that Johnson, though 
he thus showed a manly firmness, proved a most affectionate 
and indulgent husband to the last moment of Mrs. Johnson's 
life ; and in his Prayers and Meditations, we find very 
remarkable evidence that his regard and fondness for her 
never ceased even after her death. Boswell. 

Page 14. 

" I dined," said he, " very well for eight-pence, with very 
good company, at the Pine-Apple in New Street, just by. Sev- 
eral of them had travelled. They expected to meet every day; 
but did not know one another's names. It used to cost the 



ADDITIONAL NOTES, 95 

rest a shilling, for they drank wine ; but I had a cut of meat 
for sixpence, and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a 
penny ; so that I was quite well served, nay, better than the 
rest for they gave the waiter nothing." Boswell. 

Johnson loved his dinner exceedingly, and has often said 
in my hearing, perhaps for my edification, " that wherever 
the dinner is ill-got there is poverty, or there is avarice, or 
there is stupidity ; in short, the family is somehow grossly 
wrong : for," continued he, " a man seldom thinks with more 
earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner ; and 
if he cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected 
of inaccuracy in other things." One day, when he was 
speaking upon the subject, I asked him, if he ever huffed 
his wife about his dinner ? " So often," replied he, " that 
at last she called to me, and said, * Nay, hold, Mr. Johnson, 
and do not make a farce of thanking God for a dinner which 
in a few minutes you will protest not eatable.' " Piozzi. 
Page 17. 

Two of my companions, who are growing old in idleness 
are Tom Tempest and Jack Sneaker. Both of them consider 
themselves as neglected by their parties, and therefore en- 
titled to credit ; for why should they favour ingratitude ? 
They are both men of integrity, where no factious interest 
is to be promoted ; and both lovers of truth, when they are 
not heated with political debate. 

Tom Tempest is a steady friend to the house of Stuart. 
He can recount the prodigies that have appeared in the sky, 
and the calamities that have afflicted the nation every year 
from the Revolution ; and is of opinion, that, if the exiled 
famDy had continued to reign, there would have neither been 
worms in our ships, nor caterpillars on our trees. He won- 
ders that the nation was not awakened by the hard frost to a 
revocation of the true king, and is hourly afraid that the 
whole island will be lost in the sea. He believes that King 
William burnt Whitehall that he might steal the furniture ; 
and that Tillotson died an atheist. Of Queen Anne he speaks 
with more tenderness, owns that she meant well, and can tell 
by whom and why she was poisoned. In the succeeding 
reigns all has been corruption, malice, and design. He be- 
lieves that nothing ill has ever happened for these forty 



96 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

years by chance or error : he holds that the battle of Det- 
tingen was won by mistake, and that of Fontenoy lost by 
contract ; that the Victory was sunk by a private order ; 
that Cornhill was fired by emissaries from the council ; and 
the arch of Westminster bridge was so contrived as to sink, 
on purpose that the nation might be put to charge. He 
considers the new road to Islington as an encroachment on 
liberty, and often asserts that broad wheels will be the ruin 
of England. 

Tom is generally vehement and noisy, but nevertheless has 
some secrets which he always communicates in a whisper. 
Many and many a time has Tom told me, in a corner, that 
our miseries were almost at an end, and that we should see, 
in a month, another monarch on the throne ; the time elapses 
without a revolution ; Tom meets me again with new in- 
telligence, the whole scheme is now settled, and we shall 
see great events in another month. 

Johnson, Idler, No. 10. 

Nor deem, when Learning her last prize bestows, 

The glitt'ring eminence exempt from woes ; 

See, when the vulgar 'scape, despised or awed, 

Rebellion's vengeful talons seize on Laud. 

From meaner minds though smaller fines content, 

The plunder' d palace, or sequester 'd tent ; 

Mark'd out by dangerous parts, he meets the shock, 

And fatal Learning leads him to the block : 

Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep. 

But hear his death, ye blockheads, hear and sleep. 

Johnson, The Vanity of 'Human Wishes, 
Page 18. 

Mr. Johnson's hatred of Scotch is so well known, and so 
many of his honmots expressive of that hatred have been 
already repeated in so many books and pamphlets, that it is 
perhaps scarcely worth while to write down the conversation 
between him and a friend of that nation, who always resides 
in London, and who at his return from the Hebrides asked 
him, with a firm tone of voice, what he thought of his coun- 
try ? "That it is a very vile country to be sure, sir;" re- 
turned for answer Dr. Johnson. " Well, sir ! " replies the 
other, somewhat mortified, *' God made it." " Certainly he 
did," answers Mr. Johnson again, " but we must always 
remember that he made it for Scotchmen, and comparisons 
are odious, Mr. S ; but God made hell." Piozzi. 



ADDITIONAL NOTES, 97 

Page 22. 

Sir Joshua Reynolds told me, that upon his return froni 
Italy he met with it [the Life of Savage"] in Devonshire, 
knowing nothing of its author, and began to read it while he 
was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. 
It seized his attention so strongly, that, not being able to lay 
down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted 
to move, he found his arm totally benumbed. The rapidity 
with which this work was composed is a wonderful circum- 
stance. Johnson has been heard to say, " I wrote forty-eight 
of the printed octavo pages of the * Life of Savage ' at a sit- 
ting ; but then I sat up all night." Boswell. 
Page 23. 

While the Dictionary was going forward, Johnson lived 
part of the time in Holborn, part in Gough Square, Fleet 
Street ; and he had an upper room fitted up like a count- 
ing-house for the purpose, in which he gave to the copyists 
their several tasks. The words partly taken from other 
dictionaries, and partly supplied by himself, having been 
first written down with spaces left between them, he de- 
livered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various 
significations. The authorities were copied from the books 
themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a 
black-lead pencil, the traces of which could easily be effaced. 
I have seen several of them, in which that trouble had not 
been taken ; so that they were just as when used by the 
copyists. It is remarkable, that he was so attentive in the 
choice of the passages in which words were authorised, that 
one may read page after page of his Dictionary with im- 
provement and pleasure. Boswell. 
Page 24. 

In full-blown dignity, see Wolsey stand, 

Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand : 

To him the church, the realm, their powers consign, 

Through him the rays of regal bounty shine, 

Turn'd by his nod the stream of honour flows, 

His smile alone security bestows : 

Still to new heights his restless wishes tower, 

Claim leads to claim, and power advances power ; 

Till conquest unresisted cease to please. 

And rights submitted, left him none to cease. 

At length his sovereign frowns — the train of state 

Mark the keen glance, and watch the sign to hate. 



98 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

Where'er he turns, he meets a stranger's eye, 
His suppliants scorn him, and his followers fly ; 
Now drops at once the pride of awful state. 
The golden canopy, the glittering plate. 
The regal palace, the luxurious board, 
The liveried army and the menial lord. 
With age, with cares, with maladies oppress'd, 
He seeks the refuge of monastic rest. 
Grief aids disease, remember'd folly stings. 
And his last sighs reproach the faith of kings. 

Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 
Page 25. 

On what foundation stands the warrior's pride, 

How just his hopes, let Swedish Charles decide ; 

A frame of adamant, a soul of fire. 

No dangers fright him, and no labours tire^ ; 

O'er love, o'er fear, extends his wide domain, 

Unconquer'd lord of pleasure and of pain ; 

No joys to him pacific sceptres yield, 

War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field ; 

Behold surrounding kings their power combine, 

And one capitulate, and one resign : 

Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain ; 

" Think nothing gain'd," he cries, '' till nought remain, 

On Moscow's walls till Gothic standards fiy, 

And all be mine beneath the Polar sky." 



His fall was destined to a barren strand, 
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand ; 
He left a name, at which the world grew pale, 
To point a moral, or adorn a tale. 

Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes. 

As I went into his room the morning of my birthday once 
and said to him, "Nobody sends me any verses now, 
because I am five-and-thirty years old ; and Stella was fed 
with them till forty-six, I remember." My being just re- 
covered from illness and confinement will account for the 
manner in which he burst out suddenly, for so he did with- 
out the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without 
having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a 
minute before : — 

" Oft in danger, yet alive, 
We are come to thirty-five ; 
Long may better years arrive, # 
Better years than thirty-five. 



ADDITIONAL NOTES. 99 

Could philosophers contrive 

Life to stop at thirty-five, 

Time his hours should never drive 

O'er the bounds of thirty-five. 

High to soar, and deep to dive, 

Nature gives at thirty-five. 

Ladies, stock and tend your hive, 

Trifle not at thirty-five ; 

For howe'er we boast and strive, 

Life declines from thirty-five : 

He that ever hopes to thrive 

Must begin by thirty-five ; 

And all who wisely wish to wive 

Must look on Thrale at thirty-five." 

" And now," said he, as I was writing them down, " you 
may see what it is to come for poetry to a Dictionary- 
maker ; you may observe that the rhymes run in alphabet- 
ical order." And so they do. Piozzi. 

Page 27. 

ON THE DEATH OF MR. ROBERT LEVET, A PRACTISER IN 

PHYSIC. 

Condemned to Hope's delusive mind, 

As on we toil from day to day, 
By sudden blasts, or slow decline. 

Our social comforts drop away. 

Well tried through many a varying year, 

See Levet to the grave descend, 
Officious, innocent, sincere, 

Of every friendless name the friend. 

Yet still he fills affection's eye. 

Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind ; 
"Not letter'd arrogance deny 

Thy praise to merit unrefined. 

When fainting nature call'd for aid, 
And hovering death prepared the blow, 

His vigorous remedy display 'd 

The power of art without the show. 

Li misery's darkest cavern known, 

His useful care was ever nigh, 
Where hopeless anguish pour'd his groan. 

And lonely want retired to die. 

i« Or ui 



100 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

No summons mock'd by chill delay. 
No petty gain disdain'd by pride, 

The modest wants of every day 
The toil of every day supplied. 

His virtues walk'd their narrow round, 
Nor made a pause, nor left a void ; 

And sure th' Eternal Master found 
The single talent well employ 'd. 

The busy day — the peaceful night, 
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by ; 

His frame was firm — his powers were bright. 
Though now his eightieth year was nigh. 

Then, with no fiery throbbing pain, 

No cold gradations of decay. 
Death broke at once the vital chain, 

And freed his soul the nearest way. 



Johnson. 



EPITAPH FOR MR. HOGARTH. 

The hand of him here torpid lies. 
That drew th' essential form of grace ; 
Here closed in death th' attentive eyes, 
That saw the manners in the face. 



Johnson. 



Page 28. 

" Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without 
whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace 
all wisdom is folly : grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my 
undertaking, thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, 
but that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both 
of myself and others ; grant this, O Lord, for the sake of 
Jesus Christ, Amen." 

Johnson, Prayer on The Ramhler. 

Page 30. 

Her wedding-ring when she became his wife was, after 
death, preserved by him, as long as he lived, with an affec- 
tionate care, in a little round wooden box, in the inside of 
which he placed a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in 
fair characters, as follows : — 



ADDITIONAL NOTES, 101 

" Eheu ! 

"ELIZ. JOHNSON 

" NuPTA Jul. 9° 1736, 

" MORTUA, EHEU ! 

' ' Mart. IT 1752." BoswELL. 

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD. 

February 7, 1755. 

"My Lord, 

" I have been lately informed by the proprietor of * The 
World ' that two papers, in which my * Dictionary ' is 
recommended to the public, were written by your lord- 
ship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being 
very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know 
not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. 

" When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited 
your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, 
by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear 
to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur 
de la terre; — ^that I might obtain that regard for which I 
saw the world contending ; but I found my attendance so 
little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would 
suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your 
lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing 
which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had 
done all that I could ; and no man is well pleased to have 
his all neglected, be it ever so little. 

" Seven years, my lord, have now past, since I waited in 
your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door ; dur- 
ing which time I have been pushing on my work through 
difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have 
brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one 
act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile 
of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never 
had a patron before. 

" The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with 
Love and found him a native of the rocks. 

" Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern 
on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has 
reached ground, encumbers him with help ? The notice 
which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it 
been early, had been kind ; but it has been delayed till I 



102 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it ; till I am solitary and 
cannot impart it ; till I am known, and do not want it. I 
hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations 
where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that 
the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, 
which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. 

" Having carried on my work thus far with so little obli- 
gation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disap- 
pointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with 
less; for I have been long awakened from that dream of 
hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exulta- 
tion. My Lord, your lordship's most humble, most obe- 
dient servant, Sam. Johnson." 

There is a curious minute circumstance which struck me in 
comparing the various editions of Johnson's " Imitations of 
Juvenal." In the tenth Satire one of the couplets upon the 
vanity of wishes even for literary distinction stood thus : — 

** Yet think what ills the scholar's life assail, 
Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail." 

But after experiencing the uneasiness which Lord Chester- 
field's fallacious patronage made him feel, he dismissed the 
word garret from the sad group, and in all the subsequent 
editions the line stands 

" Toil, envy, want, the Patron, and the jail." 

BOSWELL. 

Page 32. 

The Preface furnishes an eminent instance of a double 
talent, of which Johnson was fully conscious. Sir Joshua 
Reynolds heard him say, " There are two things which I am 
confident I can do very well : one is an introduction to any 
literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it 
should be executed in the most perfect manner ; the other 
is a conclusion, showing from various causes why the exe- 
cution has not been equal to what the author promised to 
himself and to the public." Boswell. 

" In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, 
let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed ; 
and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to 
the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence 
proceeded the faults of that which it condemns ; yet it may 



ADDITIONAL NOTES. 103 

gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary 
was written with little assistance of the learned, and with- 
out any patronage of the great ; not in the soft obscurity 
of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, 
but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in 
sorrow : and it may repress the triumph of malignant criti- 
cism to observe, that if our language is not here fully dis- 
played, I have only failed in an attempt which no human 
powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient 
tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few vol- 
umes, be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate 
and delusive ; if the aggregated knowledge, and cooperat- 
ing diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them 
from the censure of Beni ; if the embodied criticks of France 
when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were 
obliged to change its economy, and give their second edi- 
tion another form ; I may surely be contented without the 
praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloomy 
solitude, what would it avail me ? I have protracted my 
work till most of those whom I wish to please have sunk 
into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty 
sounds : I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, hav- 
ing little to fear or hope from censure or from praise." 
Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary, concluding paragraph. 

Page 33. 

A few of his definitions must be admitted to be erroneous. 
Thus, Windward and Leeward, though directly of opposite 
meaning, are defined identically the same way ; as to which 
inconsiderable specks it is enough to observe, that his Pre- 
face announces that he was aware that there might be many 
such in so immense a work ; nor was he at all disconcerted 
when an instance was pointed out to him. A lady once asked 
him how he came to define Pastern the knee of a horse : 
instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he 
at once answered, * Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance." 

BOSWELL. 

Page 34. 

Many of these excellent essays were written as hastily as 
an ordinary letter. Mr. Langton remembers Johnson, when 
on a visit to Oxford, asking him one evening how long it 
was till the post went out ; and on being told about half an 



104 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

hour, he exclaimed, " Then we shall do very well." He upon 
this instantly sat down and finished an " Idler," which it 
was necessary should be in London the next day. Mr. 
Langton having signified a wish to read it, " Sir (said he) 
you shall not do more than I have done myself." He then 
folded it up and sent it off. Boswell. 

Page 44. 

That the most minute singularities which belonged to him, 
and made very observable parts of his appearance and man- 
ner, may not be omitted, it is requisite to mention, that, 
while talking, or even musing as he sat in his chair, he 
commonly held his head to one side towards his right 
shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his 
body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in 
the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the 
intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his 
mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chew- 
ing the cud, sometimes giving a half-whistle, sometimes 
making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his 
mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding 
it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly, 
under his breath, too, too, too : all this accompanied some- 
times with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a 
smile. Generally, when he had concluded a period, in the 
course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal ex- 
hausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out 
his breath like a whale. This, I suppose, was a relief to his 
lungs ; and seemed in him to be a contemptuous mode of 
expression, as if he had made the arguments of his oppo- 
nent fly like chaff before the wind. Boswell. 

Page 45. 

Not very long after the institution of our Club, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. " I like it much," 
said he, " I think I shall be of you." When Sir Joshua 
mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased 
with the actor's conceit. " He HI he of us,^* said Johnson, 
" how does he know we will permit, him ? The first duke in 
England has no right to hold such language." However, 
when Garrick was regularly proposed, some time afterwards, 
Johnson, though he had taken a momentary offence at his 
arrogance, warmly and kindly supported him, and he was 



ADDITIONAL NOTES, 105 

accordingly elected, was a most agreeable member, and 
continued to attend our meetings to the time of his death. 

BOSWELL. 

Page 45. 

Dr. Goldsmith said once to Dr. Johnson that he wished 
for some additional members to the Literary Club, to give it 
an agreeable variety, " for," said he, " there can now be no- 
thing new among us : we have travelled over one another's 
minds." Johnson seemed a little angry, and said, " Sir, 
you have not travelled over my mind, I promise you." 

BoswELL. 
Page 61. 

"Almighty God, Father of all mercy, help me by Thy grace, 
that I may with humble and sincere thankfulness remember 
the comforts and conveniences which I have enjoyed at this 
place, and that I may resign them with holy submission, 
equally trusting in thy protection when Thou givest and 
when Thou takest away. Have mercy upon me, Lord, 
have mercy upon me. To thy fatherly protection, O Lord, 
I commend this family. Bless, guide and defend them, 
that they may so pass through this world as finally to enjoy 
in thy presence everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ's 
sake, Amen." 

" I was called early," his note continues, " I packed up 
my bundles and used the foregoing prayer, with my morning 
devotions somewhat, I think, enlarged. Being earlier than 
the family, I read St. Paul's farewell, in the Acts, and then, 
read fortuitously in the Gospels, which was my parting use 
of the library." 

Johnson, Prayer on leaving Thrale^s Family. 

Page 62. 

No. 103. 

Saturday, April 5, 1760. 
Respicere ad longse jussit spatia ultima vitse. Juv. 

Much of the pain and pleasure of mankind arises from the 
conjectures which every one makes of the thoughts of others ; 
we all enjoy praise which we do not hear, and resent con- 
tempt which we do not see. The Idler may therefore be 
forgiven, if he suffers his imagination to represent to him 
what his readers will say or think when they are informed 
that they have now his last paper in their hands. 



106 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

Value is more frequently raised by scarcity than by use. 
That which lay neglected when it was common, rises in es- 
timation as its quantity becomes less. We seldom learn the 
true want of what we have, till it is discovered that we can 
have no more. 

This essay will, perhaps, be read with care even by those 
who have not yet attended to any other ; and he that finds 
this late attention recompensed, will not forbear to wish 
that he had bestowed it sooner. 

Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close 
friendship, they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There 
are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without 
some emotion of uneasiness, " this is the last.'* Those who 
never could agree together, shed tears when mutual dis- 
content has determined them to final separation; of a place 
which has been frequently visited, though without pleasure, 
the last look is taken with heaviness of heart ; and the Idler, 
with all his chillness of tranquillity, is not wholly unaffected 
by the thought that his last essay is now before him. 

This secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking 
being, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. 
We always make a secret comparison between a part and 
the whole : the termination of any period of life reminds us 
that life itself has likewise its termination ; when we have 
done anything for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that 
a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more are 
past there are less remaining. 

It is very happily and kindly provided, that in every life 
there are certain pauses and interruptions which force con- 
sideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light ; 
points of time where one course of action ends, and another 
begins ; and by vicissitudes of fortune, or alteration of em- 
ployment, by changes of place or loss of friendship, we are 
forced to say of something, " this is the last." 

An even and unvaried tenour of life always hides from our 
apprehension the approach of its end. Succession is not 
perceived but by variation ; he that lives to-day as he lived 
yesterday, and expects that as the present day is, such will 
be the morrow, easily conceives time as running in a circle 
and returning to itself. The uncertainty of our duration is 
impressed commonly by dissimilitude of condition ; it is only 



ADDITIONAL NOTES. 107 

by finding life changeable that we are reminded of its 
shortness. 

This conviction, however forcible at every new impression, 
is every moment fading from the mind ; and partly by the 
inevitable incursion of new images, and partly by voluntary 
exclusion of unwelcome thoughts, we are again exposed to 
the universal fallacy ; and we must do another thing for the 
last time, before we consider that the time is nigh when we 
shall do no more. 

As the last Idler is published in that solemn week which 
the Christian world has always set apart for the examination 
of the conscience, the review of life, the extinction of earthly 
desires, and the renovation of holy purposes ; I hope that 
my readers are already disposed to view every incident with 
seriousness, and improve it by meditation ; and that when 
they see this series of trifles brought to a conclusion, they 
will consider that, by outliving the Idler, they have passed 
weeks, mouths, and years, which are now no longer in their 
power ; that an end must in time be put to everything great, 
as to everything little ; that to life must come its last hour, 
and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which 
probation ceases and repentance will be vain : the day in 
which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart 
shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity 
shall be determined by the past. Johnson. 

Page 62. 

TO MRS. PIOZZT. 

London, July 8th, 1784. 

Dear Madam, — 

What you have done, however I may lament it, I have 
no pretence to resent, as it has not been injurious to me ; 
I therefore breathe out one sigh more of tenderness, per- 
haps useless, but at least sincere. 

I wish that God may grant you every blessing, that you 
may be happy in this world for its short continuance, and 
eternally happy in a better state ; and whatever I can con- 
tribute to your happiness I am very ready to repay, for that 
kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically 
wretched. 

Do not think slightly of the advice which I now presume 
to offer. Prevail upon Mr. Piozzi to settle in England : you 



108 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 

may live here with more dignity than in Italy, and with more 
security; your rank will be higher, and your fortune more 
under your own eye. I desire not to detail all my reasons ; 
but every argument of prudence and interest is for England, 
and only some phantoms of imagination seduce you to Italy. 

I am afraid, however, that my counsel is vain, yet I have 
eased my heart by giving it. 

When Queen Mary took the resolution of sheltering her- 
self in England, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, attempting 
to dissuade her, attended on her journey; and when they 
came to the irremediable stream that separated the two king- 
doms, walked by her side into the water, in the middle of 
which he seized her bridle, and with earnestness proportioned 
to her danger and his own affection pressed her to return. 
The queen went forward. If the parallel reaches thus far, 
may it go no farther. — The tears stand in my eyes. 

I am going into Derbyshire, and hope to be followed by 
your good wishes, for I am, with great affection, your, &c., 

Johnson. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 109 



SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 

Special points for investigation are suggested throughout the 
footnotes to the essay; to these the following may be added : — 

Endeavor through reading such books as Tom Brown^s School- 
days to get a good idea of the life led by a pupil of a great Eng- 
lish public school. 

Consider in connection with Johnson's experiences at Oxford 
the alienation from their universities of such great writers as 
Milton, Dryden, Gibbon, and Shelley. 

Name other great English authors whose physical defects 
were notorious, e. g. Pope. 

Examine one of the early volumes of The Gentleman^ s Magazine. 

Examine a few pages of Johnson's Dictionary and compare 
them with some great modern dictionary. 

Read Johnson's London, Vanity of Human Wishes, and On the 
Death of Mr. Robert Levet, 

Read Rasselas, and try to form an opinion as to the justice 
of Macaulay's criticism, also to determine why the story became 
and has remained a classic. 

Compare Johnson's Irene with Addison's Cato and read the 
chapter on the drama of the eighteenth century in Brander 
Matthews's The Development of the Drama. This chapter can 
also be found in The Sewanee Review for January, 1903. 

Read Johnson's account of Gray in his Lives of the Poets, and 
compare with it the essays on Gray by Matthew Arnold and 
James Russell Lowell. 

Read one or more of the best of Johnson's Lives, e. g. that of 
Cowley. (See page 59.) 

Read one or more of the best of the Rambler papers (page 30) 
and compare Johnson's early with his later style. 

Read Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare. (Part 
of this may be found in Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth 
to Victoria.^ 

Widen your acquaintance with Garrick, Burke, Gibbon, Gold- 
smith, and others of Dr. Johnson's great contemporaries, using 
the articles in Craik's English Prose, the Encyclopcedia Britan- 
nica and the Dictionary of National Biography, Bos well's Life of 
Johnson, histories of English literature in the eighteenth century, 



110 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 

and the bibliographies given in such a book as J. Scott Clark's 
Study of English Prose Writers. 

What/ part was played by Dr. Johnson in the publication of 
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield ? 

Contrast the positions taken by Johnson and Burke with re- 
gard to the struggle of the American colonies against Great 
Britain. 

Is it likely that any one in our day could become such a liter- 
ary dictator as Johnson was ? 



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